Iptintttnn Mmurrfiitg 

THE LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
LECTURES FOR 1917-1918 



was established in 1912 with a bequest of $25,000 
under the will of Louis Clark Vanuxem, of the 
Class of 1879. By direction of the executors of 
Mr. Vanuxem's estate, the income of the foun- 
dation is to be used for a series of public lectures 
delivered in Princeton annually, at least one half 
of which shall be on subjects of current scientific 
interest. The lectures are to be published and 
distributed among schools and libraries generally. 



The following lectures have already been pub- 
lished or are in press: 

1912-13 The Theory of Permutable Functions, by 
Vito Volterra 

1913-14 Lectures delivered in connection with the 
dedication of the Graduate College of 
Princeton University by Emile Boutroux, 
Alois Riehl, A. D. Godley, and Arthur 
Shipley 

1914-15 Romance, by Sir Walter Raleigh 

1915-16 A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, 
by Thomas Hunt Morgan 

1916-17 The Mineral Resources of Civilization, 
by Charles R. Van Hise 

1917-18 Platonism, by Paul Elmer More 



LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 



PLATONISM 



BY 

PAUL ELMER MORE 

AUTHOR OF THE "SHBLBTIBNE ESSATS" 



LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
OCTOBER 29, 30, 31, NOVEMBER 6, 7, 1917 



PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 

PRINCETON 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1917 



^i 



s 



Copyright, 1917, by 
Princeton University Press 

Published November, 1917 
Printed in the United States of America 



!£C -6 1917 

^0,4477869 




1 



Alo St) ^^17 Sv acrta? €1817 hiDpit^ecrO ai, to fikv 
dvayKoiov, to Se Oelov, koX to ^ev Oelov iv aTracriv 
^TjTeiif KTujcreco^; iveKa evSaCfiovo^ ^lov, Ka6* ocrov 
rjfJLOJT/ Tj <^vcn<; ivhe^^erai, to he avayKoiov iKeCpcop 
^dpiv^ \oyit^6p.evov a)s dvev tovtcov ov SvvaTa airrd 
iKCLPa i(l>^ of? (TTTOvSoi^ofJiej/ fxova KaTavoelv ovS' av 
\a^elv ovS' aXX&>9 ttw? joterao-xeiz'. — Timaeus, 68e. 

'Ef &v iTTopiadfieOa (^iKocroi^ia*; yepo'?, ov [jLei^ov 
dyaOov ovr rfXOev ovre rj^ei ttotc tco 6v7]T(o yevei 
ScoprjOev iK 6ewv. — Timaeus, 47a. 



PREFACE 

Though this book goes out under the rather 
presumptuous title of Platonism, no one can be 
more aware than the author of the incomplete- 
ness of its argument. Almost nothing, for in- 
stance, is said of education and art and govern- 
ment, to name a few of the subsidiary subjects 
that occupy a large and important place in the 
Dialogues. These alluring topics have been 
passed by, somewhat reluctantly, in order that 
attention might be concentrated on the ethical 
theme that runs through all Plato's discussions 
and is certainly the mainspring of his philosophy. 
At another time and in another volume I may 
undertake to fill out the omissions here acknow- 
ledged; but, whether that is done or not, my pur- 
pose in the work now pubUshed has been to lay 
the foundation for a series of studies on the ori- 
gins and early environment of Christianity and 
on such more modem movements as the Enghsh 
revival of philosophic religion in the seventeenth 
century and the rise of romanticism in the eigh- 
teenth. My conviction is that behind all these 
movements the strongest single influence has 
been the perilous spirit of liberation brought into 
the world by the disciple of Socrates, and that our 



vi PREFACE 

mental and moral atmosphere, so to speak, is 
still permeated with inveterate perversions of 
Plato's doctrine. 

It will be seen that my aim, in the present vol- 
mne and in its projected sequels, is not so much 
to produce a work of history — ^though, of course, 
historical accuracy must be the first requisite — as 
to write what a Greek Platonist would have called 
a ProtrepticuSj an invitation, that is, to the prac- 
tice of philosophy. In saying this I am under 
no delusion as to what such a work is likely to 
accomplish. Readers of settled convictions who 
happen to take up this presentation of philosophy 
will accept or reject it in accordance with the 
bent of their minds ; and I know that the current 
of thought today runs against me and not with 
me. It is a fact to be reckoned with now, as it 
was when Socrates talked on these matters in the 
gaol of Athens, that for those who differ on fun- 
damental principles there is no common counsel 
but only contempt for each other ; as St. Augus- 
tine says, si non sit intus qui doceat inanis fit 
strepitus noster. My hope would be with those 
who are still searching — particularly if I might 
touch the minds of a few of our generous college 
youth who, finding the intellectual life deprived 
of centre or significance, drift through the sup- 
posedly utiUtarian courses of economics and bio- 
logy, and so enter the world with no better 
preparation against its distractions than a vague 



PREFACE vii 

and soon-spent yearning for social service and a 
benumbing trust in mechanical progress. I can 
foresee no restoration of humane studies to their 
lost position of leadership until they are felt once 
more to radiate from some central spiritual truth. 
I do not believe that the aesthetic charms of Uter- 
ature can supply this want, nor is it clear to me 
that a purely scientific analysis of the facts of 
moral experience can furnish the needed motive ; 
the former is too apt to rim into dilettantism, and 
the latter appeals too little to the imagination 
and the springs of enthusiasm. Only through 
the centrahzing force of rehgious faith or through 
its equivalent in philosophy can the intellectual 
life regain its meaning and authority for earnest 
men. Yet, for the present at least, the dogmas 
of religion have lost their hold, while the current 
philosophy of the schools has become in large 
measure a quibbling of speciahsts on technical 
points of minor importance, or, where serious, 
too commonly has surrendered to that flattery of 
the instinctive elements of human nature which 
is the very negation of mental and moral disci- 
pline. 

It is in such a belief and such a hope, whether 
right or wrong, that I have turned back to the 
truth, still potent and fresh and salutary, which 
Plato expounded in the troubled and doubting 
days of Greece — the truth which is in religion but 
is not boimded by religious dogma, and which 



viii PREFACE 

needs no confirmation by miracle or inspired tra- 
dition. The first task before me was to see this 
philosophy in its naked outlines, stripped of its 
confusing accessories, and cleared of the misun- 
derstandings which, starting among the barba- 
rians of Alexandria, have made of Platonism too 
often a support instead of a corrective of the 
disintegrating forces of society. This I have at- 
tempted to do, with imperfect success no doubt, 
in the present volume. If, when the series is 
completed, I may have succeeded in directing a 
few seeking minds to the inexhaustible source of 
strength and comfort in the Platonic Dialogues, 
I shall account my labour amply rewarded. Of 
strength and comfort we have need enough in 
these trying times, and shall have no less need in 
the days of peace, when they come. 

To one criticism I should be sensitive. Those 
who have read the eighth volume of my Shelburne 
Essays will recognize that the present work is 
virtually an expansion of the views there summed 
up in the Definitions of Dualism, and they may 
think that I have tried to impose my own theories 
on Plato, to measure him in my pint cup. In a 
way every interpreter of a great author must be 
open to such a charge; he has no other measure 
than his own capacity. But at least I am not 
guilty of attempting to force Plato into confor- 
mity with a preconceived system ; the Definitions 
of Dualism were themselves the result of my 



PREFACE ix 

study of the Dialogues, and avowedly rejected 
any pretensions to originality. 

In making the translations from Plato scat- 
tered through the following pages I have often 
had other versions before me, and have not scru- 
pled to draw on them quite freely for words and 
phrases. Where these passages are included in 
inverted commas, I have adhered to the original 
as closely as possible while conforming to Eng- 
lish idiom. The passages not so indicated, but 
noted by marginal references, are rather allu- 
sions than quotations. 

Finally, I have to thank the trustees of the 
Vanuxem fund for permitting me to print in this 
volimie a large amount of material which it 
was impossible to include in the coxirse of five 
lectures. 



P. E. M. 



Princeton, N. J., 

May 1, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

I The Three Socratie Theses 1 

II The Socratie Quest 28 

III The Platonic Quest 54 

IV The Socratie Paradox: the DuaUsm 

of Plato 79 

V Psychology 118 

VI The Doctrine of Ideas 162 

VII Science and Cosmogony 204 

VIII Metaphysics 232 

IX Conclusion 270 

Appendix 299 



XL 



PLATONISM 

CHAPTER I 

THE THREE SOCRATIC THESES 
No person of antiquity, scarcely any of the 
modem world, has been portrayed so vividly as 
the master whom Plato made the responsible 
mouthpiece of his speculations. We seem to de- 
scry the man Socrates in the very flesh ; we can al- 
most hear his voice, as he talked with friends and 
strangers in the agora and other meeting-places 
of Athens. But when we come to consider him as 
a philosopher in his own right, and to determine 
precisely what he taught, the way is not so plain. 
Of the two main witnesses on whom we must rely 
for our knowledge of his teaching, the one, our 
gossiping Xenophon, imderstood him too little, 
whereas the other understood him, in a manner, 
too well, developing his instruction into so rich 
and voluminous a body of thought that Socrates 
might have exclaimed with some apparent reason, 
as indeed he is said actually to have done on 
hearing one of the simpler of Plato's Dialogues: 
"By Heracles, what lies the young man has told 
about me!" Our conception of the Socratic phil- 



Parmenides 
130a 



2 PLATONISM 

osophy is thus, like the Eros of the wonderful 
ymposium ^^^^^^ q£ Mautiuea, the child of Penury and 
Abundance — an Abundance, we might add, 
"drunken with the drink of the gods." 

Yet withal the leading theses of Socrates are 
in themselves, and taken separately, clear enough 
— or ought to be so to any one who approaches 
the subject with open mind — and the real diffi- 
culty begins only when we undertake to combine 
them into a coherent system, and to weigh their 
remoter consequences. These leading doctrines, 
if we may give such a name to the impulses that 
carried him towards philosophy, were three: an 
intellectual scepticism, a spiritual affirmation, 
and a tenacious belief in the identity of virtue and 
knowledge. 

Of the sceptical, questioning disposition of So- 
crates we have ample testimony. This was the 
trait, particularly as it touched the common tra- 
dition in matters of government and morals, that 
most impressed those of his contemporaries who 
did not belong to the inner circle of disciples. 
And probably the irony of Socrates, his real or 
feigned ignorance used as a dissolvent of the as- 
simied knowledge of others, is the characteristic 
first suggested today by the mention of his name. 
He himself, when obliged to defend his life be- 
fore the tribunal of his fellow citizens, manfully 
admitted this scepticism, and even claimed for it 
Apology 2iA a divine sanction. One of his friends, so he de- 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 3 

clared, had gone to Delphi to inquire of the oracle 
whether there was any one wiser than Socrates, 
and had been told that there was none wiser. 
Whereupon Socrates, amazed and incredulous, 
had put himself to the task of testing this strange 
saying. His method of inquiry (which we may 
suppose he had employed from the beginning of 
his pubhc career, though with less deliberate pur- 
pose before the intervention of the oracle) was to 
select a man eminent for wisdom, and to cross- 
question him about his knowledge; and this he 
did repeatedly, and always with the same result. 
"It would soon become apparent," he says, "that 
to many people, and most of all to himself, the 
man seemed to be wise, whereas in truth he was 
not so at all. Thereupon I would try to show 
him how he was wise in opinion only and not in 
reality; but I merely made myself a nuisance to 
him and to many of those about him. So I used 
to go away reflecting that at least I was wiser 
than this man. Neither of us, I would say to 
myself, knows anything much worth while, but 
he in his ignorance thinks he knows, whereas I 
neither know nor think I know."^ 

^ I hold for many reasons that the biographical parts of 
the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo present a faithful picture 
of the man Socrates, and in the main give a true account 
of his last days, however the glamour of Plato's rhetoric 
may lie over the whole. It is easier to believe in the power 
of Nature to create such a character than in the ability of 
an author to imagine it. Furthermore, though Xenophon 



4 PLATONISM 

But if the existence, even the predominance, 
of the doubting mood in Socrates cannot be over- 
looked, the quahty of this scepticism needs none 
the less to be sharply distinguished from what 
commonly passes imder the name. The matter 
stands thus. Absolute suspension of judgment, 
however a man may profess it in words or strive 
to attain it in practice, is an impossibility. You 
may deny the power of human reason to explain 
the cause and ultimate nature of things; but the 
moment you do this, you will find yourself, if you 
examine your mind honestly, putting credence in 
some faculty either above the reason or below 
the reason. Some relation to appearances you 
must assume, some motive of action you are 
bound to obey, some affirmation you are forced 
to make ; ^ the only choice is to which of the alter- 
native sohcitations you will say yes, and to which 
you will say no. Thus, when a man calls himself 
a sceptic, it commonly means that he subscribes 
to some form of materialistic dogma, and practi- 

probably had little intercourse with Socrates and certainly 
was lio philosopher, yet he gives the same report of So- 
crates* ordinary ways of life, and one can find in the Me- 
morabilia clear traces of the three Socratic theses. 

^ This fact is virtually acknowledged by the clever ex- 
ponent of ancient scepticism, Sextus Empiricus. See his 
Hypotyposes i, 17, et passim. As for modern agnostics, 
so-called, they too reserve their scepticism for the "unknow- 
able" things of the spirit, and are thorough-going dogma- 
tists in their theories of conduct based on the ikcmi irddrj. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 5 

cally believes that pleasures and pains of the 
body, however he may refine and intelleetualize 
their quality, are the one certain fact of experi- Phaedo ssb 
ence. As the followers of Aristippus used to 
say : "Only our sensations are comprehensible." 
This creed may be adopted from mere indolence 
of mind, or in the combative manner of the 
schools — but with results curiously ahke. Ac- 
cording to his first disciple, Pyrrho, the father of 
professional scepticism, reduced the problems of 
philosophy to these three: "What is the nature 
of things? How should we be disposed towards 
them? What is the consequence to us of this de- 
termination?" The answer was that we know 
nothing of the great forces playing about us, and 
that he is wise who, freeing his soul of trouble- 
some fears or questions, does not look beyond the 
pleasure within his reach.^ There is a pretty 
parable that tells how Pyrrho enforced this doc- 
trine. Being once at sea and caught in a storm, 
he rebuked the terror of the passengers by point- 
ing to a little pig that kept on feeding through 
all the conmiotion — such, he said, ought to be the 
tranquillity of the wise man. There is an affir- 
mation in this — deck and disguise it as you will — 
the affirmation of the sty: pinguem et nitidum 
vises Epicuri de grege porcum. Such a man may 
call himself a philosophical sceptic by reason of 
his anti-rationalism, but his philosophy comes 

^ See Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica xiv, 18, 2. 



6 PLATONISM 

from a plane below the reason, and is hard to dis- 
tinguish from the indolent self-assurance that is 
content to do without thinking at all. 

If we take the word "sceptic" in its truer sense, 
as describing one who takes nothing on trust but 
examines the facts of experience to their last con- 
clusion, the Epicurean or Pyrrhonist has no right 
to the name, since he still labours under the de- 
lusion of supposing he knows what he does not 
know, and has yet to learn that pleasure and pain 
have no final value in themselves, but must be es- 
timated by their relation to values of quite an- 
other order. Manifestly, at least, the scepticism 
of Socrates was no Pyrrhonic drifting with the 
current of opinion; it meant to him rather an 
unwearied questioning of the solicitations of both 
the reason and the senses, and a continuous ex- 
ercise of the will, being of all states of mind the 
rarest and the most difficult for a man in this 
world to maintain. Doubt was thus to Socrates 
the beginning both of philosophy and of morality 
— ^of philosophy, since only those are prompted 
Lysis 218a to philosophizc truly who are ignorant and, at the 
same time, aware of their ignorance ; of morality, 
since only those will feel the compelling of a 
higher impulse who have seen through the illu- 
sory curtain of the senses. When Socrates came 
to explain to the court why he had not hesitated 
in a course of action which was sure to bring him 
into peril of losing what most men prize, includ- 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 7 

ing life itself, he replied boldly that he had fol- 
lowed the behest of the God for the reason that 
of those so-called perils we have no real know- 
ledge — ^not even of the greatest of them. "For 
the fear of death," he said, "is just another form Apology 29a 
of appearing wise when we are foolish, and of 
seeming to know what we know not. No mortal '^/ 
knoweth of death whether it be not the greatest 
of all good things to man, yet do men fear it as 
if they knew it to be the greatest of evils. And is 
not this that most culpable ignorance which pre- 
tends to know what it knows not?" This sounds 
like the parable of Pyrrho and his pig; but note 
the difference in the consequences drawn. So- 
crates was not contradicting himself, but was 
basing his conduct on a prof ounder form of scep- 
ticism than Pyrrho's, when, in one and the same 
discourse, he avowed that his only wisdom was 
to know his own ignorance, yet declared himself 
ready to face death with this downright affirma- 
tion: "To do wrong and to disobey our superior, 
whether human or divine, this I do know to be an 
evil and shameful thing." He had an invincible 
assurance of this spiritual fact for the very reason 
that his scepticism went deep enough to include 
those current judgments and those immediate 
values of sensation which to a Pyrrho were the 
only certain guides through the perplexities of 
hfe. 

There is, then, no inconsistency in the imion of 



8 PLATONISM 

intellectual scepticism and spiritual afBrmation; 
rather, scepticism is the negative aspect of the 
same intuitive truth of which spiritual affirmation 
is the positive aspect. It would even be a grave 
error — the gravest of all errors in its possible 
consequences — to reckon the sceptical attitude, 
because it is purely negative, as less essential to 
the Socratic life than its positive coimterpart. 
It is, if anything, more essential ; for its authority 
extends in a way beyond reason and the senses to 
the highest citadel of the soul. Our one safe- 
guard against a host of ruinous deceptions that 
speak in the name of the spirit is the obstinate 
interrogation of every affirmation of every sort, 
and the holding of each presumptive truth to give 
proof of itself in experience. In later years these 
two aspects of Socratic doctrine were developed 
independently into separate schools, the sceptic, 
of which we have spoken, and the Neoplatonic. 
If Socrates had been ahve, and had been forced 
to choose between the books of a Sextus Empiri- 
cus, let us say, who in the name of scepticism re- 
jected all authority of reason and the higher in- 
tuition, and the books of a Proclus, who accepted 
almost without discrimination any words uttered 
in the name of the spirit, he would have ranged 
himself, I am sure, with Sextus, and would have 
expended his powers of irony upon the religious 
jargon of the self-styled Platonist. He would 
have preferred the half-truth of the one to the 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 9 

sham-truth of the other; and Plato would have 
made the same choice. 

But if it is easy to see how true scepticism and 
spiritual intuition may go hand in hand, the case 
is different when to these two theses we add the 
third. It was one of Socrates' favorite maxims 
that no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only 
through ignorance — a saying hard to reconcile 
with the actual conduct of the world, hard to re- 
concile with the other aspects of the Socratic doc- 
trine. On its face this maxim implies an equation 
of virtue and knowledge, and by knowledge the 
evidence obliges us to believe that Socrates meant, 
not indeed a Pyrrhonic acquiescence in the solici- 
tations of the present, but that larger calculation 
of life in the terms of pleasure and pain which 
from his day to this has been the mark of the 
rationahzing utihtarian. As we know better, he 
would say, the near and remote consequences of 
our acts in those terms, we are enabled to conduct 
ourselves more prudently; and this prudence is 
virtue. How, one asks in some bewilderment, 
can a teacher maintain such a thesis as this, yet 
as a sceptic reject the authority of the senses, and 
as a mystic avow that his morality depends on a 
superrational intuition? How can the same man 
be a rationalizing utihtarian and a sceptical 
mystic? 

However perplexing such a union of contra- 
ries may appear to us, we have nothing to do but 



10 PLATONISM 

to accept the paradox as it stands. Above all we 
must not emphasize the rationalistic thesis so as 
to suppress the other two. In that way we should 
fall into the totally inadequate conception of So- 
crates made current to-day by the Greek Think- 
ers of Theodor Gomperz. According to that bril- 
liant and much-quoted history, the Platonic So- 
crates, with his religious and fundamentally scep- 
tical traits, is to be rejected for a mere questioner 
of popular tradition and promoter of the ration- 
ahstic "Enlightenment." The story in the 
Apology of his self-dedication to the service of 
the God is pure moonshine; Socrates had one 
simple aim, to set forth the unity of virtue and 
knowledge, and to that end there was no need of 
exhortation or animating appeal, no room for any 
positive ethical teaching based on an authority 
higher than reason. Now the Socrates of this 
school of interpreters is an impossibility — a crea- 
ture manufactured in a Teutonic phrontisterion, 
and not the hving man of Athens from whom the 
deepest inspiration of philosophy has flowed even 
to this day. Gomperz himself offers a corrective 
to his portrait by quoting as the motto for his 
volume this sentence from Clement of Alexan- 
dria: "Wherefore also Cleanthes in his second 
book Concerning Pleasure says that Socrates al- 
ways identified the just man and the happy man, 
and cursed him who first distinguished between 
the just and the profitable as one who had done 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 11 

an impious thing J" There is decidedly something 
of the exhorter and preacher of virtue in the 
words itahcized, though we need not, for all 
that, picture Socrates quite as a Lutheran par- 
son. If Clement is right, and Plato was not a 
mere mystificator, and if human nature has any 
place in the study of philosophy, then Gomperz 
is wrong. We may be certain that beneath the 
irony of Socrates, deeper than his questioning of 
popular phrases and his search for precision of 
definition, lay a power of very positive teaching 
and a direct appeal to the conscience, in his own 
way and at his own time, which smote the heart 
even of such a worldling as Alcibiades to the 
quick, and shall never cease to vibrate in the 
hearts of Uving men. Plutarch was in the right 
tradition when, remembering the confession of 
Alcibiades, he said that "outwardly Socrates to 
those who met him appeared rude and imcouth 
and overbearing, but within was full of earnest- 
ness and of matters that moved his hearers to 
tears and wrung their hearts."^ 

On the other hand we must be on our guard 
against the contrary extreme of those scholars, 
such as Burnet and Taylor of St. Andrews, who, 
in their laudable desire to reinstate Socrates as a 
religious teacher and seer, go so far as to make a 
mechanical division between the rationalistic and 
the mystical elements in the Platonic Dialogues, 

* Cato vii. 



12 PLATONISM 

and then relegate all the former to Plato himself 
and derive all the latter from Socrates. Profes- 
sor Bmnet^ would even have us believe that in 
the earher Dialogues, down to and including The 
Republic, Plato was merely reproducing as a 
dramatic artist the mystic and idealistic Pytha- 
goreanism of his master, whereas in the later Dia- 
logues he breaks away from this and gives ex- 
pression to his own scientific and anti-Socratic 
rationahsm. Now, with all due deference to the 
great learning of Professor Burnet, one must say 
that such a theory has no warrant in history or in 
common sense. To assert that a man could write 
The Republic without a definite philosophy of his 
own is to run pretty close to a pedantic absurd- 
ity; and it is not much better to maintain that 
there was no rationahsm in the teaching of So- 
crates than that there was no mysticism in the 
teaching of Plato. 

The efforts of various scholars to escape the 
Socratic Paradox by representing him on the one 
hand as a pure rationalist or on the other hand 
as a pure mystic are equally untenable. So far 
as we can judge from the records, Socrates never 
attempted to find an interpretation of the word 
"knowledge" which should reconcile his third 
thesis with the other two, nor did he even, we may 
suppose, see quite so logical a synthesis of his 
intellectual scepticism and higher intuition as we 

^ Greek Philosophy, Part I, pp. 178, 179 £f. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 13 

have felt justified in deriving from the language 
of the Apology. For the most part he was con- / 
tent, it should appear, to enunciate his three 
principles as independent truths, and to enforce 
now one and now another of them as occasion 
prompted, leaving to his disciples, the creators 
of the so-called Socratic schools, the labour of 
constructing from them what properly may be 
regarded as a philosophic system. Endless in- 
consistencies and controversies were to arise 
among his successors from the varying emphasis 
placed by them on the different aspects of his 
creed. To Plato alone it was given to combine 
the three theses without sacrificing one for the 
other, and so to develop a philosophy that tran- 
scended the master's actual teaching while in no 
fundamental matter betraying it. So success- 
fully did he accomphsh this great task that to 
the world at large Socrates has come to stand 
for httle more than a mouthpiece of the Pla- 
tonic speculations. Nevertheless we shall be do- 
ing a grave injustice if, caught by the spell of 
Plato's richer and subtler genius, we forget that 
the imposing enimciation of his three doctrines 
by Plato's teacher was the determining event in 
the moral and religious life of the Western 
world; for the supreme need of a man's soul is 
not that he should acquire a splendid system of 
philosophy, but that he should hold as an inex- 
pugnable possession that spirit of scepticism and 



14 PLATONISM 

insight and that assurance of the identity of vir- 
tue and knowledge for which Socrates hved and 
died.^ 

Yet however important, even revolutionary, 
the work of Socrates may appear, we must re- 
member that he was only one teacher among 
many; nor can we rightly understand the Pla- 
tonic philosophy without taking into account the 
strong currents of thought, sympathetic and 
antipathetic, amid which it took its origin. The 
age of Socrates was notable for an intellectual 
curiosity and a moral fermentation for which 
there is perhaps only one parallel in history, and 
that parallel takes us out of Europe to Asia. 
There, in the country of the Ganges, at a some- 
what earher date, the old formahties of religion 
had ceased to satisfy the devout Hindu wor- 
shipper, and he could no longer accept the tradi- 
tional precepts of morality until he had justified 
them at the bar of his own conscience. Every- 
where men were asking themselves and one an- 
other about the underlying truth of things, and 
a rumour went abroad that certain lonely ex- 
plorers had discovered a treasure of knowledge 
which they held as a secret possession. And so 
the books of the period are filled with stories, 

^ The Christian philosophy of Pascal is founded on three 
similar principles: "II faut avoir ces trois qualites, pyr- 
rhonien, geometre, Chretien soumis; et elles s'accordent, et 
se temperent, en doutant ou il faut, en assurant ou il faut, 
et en se soumettant oii il faut." — Pensee 268, Brunschvicg. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 15 

some of them quaint and obscure, others very 
beautiful, of eager inquirers who went out into 
the wilderness, where the sages had their solitary 
abodes, to question and hsten, and to learn, if 
they were deemed worthy, the new meaning of 
the old words of rehgion and morahty. 

Something hke that, though the methods of 
teaching and the final results were different, was 
going on in Greece during the lifetime of Socra- 
tes. The supposed possessors of the secret were 
not eremites hiding in the forest depths, but 
teachers who called themselves sophists and went 
about from city to city imparting instruction for 
a price; and the inquirers who flocked to their 
lectures were not, for the most part, rehgious 
enthusiasts, but young men of family who were 
looking for the readiest path to honour and power 
in civic hfe. Yet, withal, the mental and moral 
ferments were much the same as in India, and in 
both lands the deepest problems of law and faith 
did not pass through the ordeal untouched. 

Not the least extraordinary of Plato's literary 
gifts is his skill in reproducing in a colder age 
the ardour which surrounded his childhood and 
youth. In the opening of such a Dialogue as the 
Protagoras, for instance, there is a note of excite- 
ment, of expectation, which carries the reader 
back to a society stirred by a veritable renaissance 
of wonder. Even the more conservative citizens 
were moved, some to hostility, some to friendly 



16 PLATONISM 

curiosity. So, in the Theages, we have a charm- 
ingly realistic picture of an elderly man, of posi- 
tion and property, coming into Athens from the 
country to consult Socrates about the education 
of his son ; for the boy has heard rumours of the 
marvellous cunning of these professors who are 
flocking to the city from the ends of the world, 
and is determined to place himself as a pupil 
under one of them. The father, as befits a solid 
man of the soil, is bewildered and anxious; he 
doesn't mind spending the necessary money, but 
he has his suspicion of these innovations and he 
fears they are as likely to corrupt as to inform. 
Whereupon Socrates turns to the young man, 
and quizzes him to bring out just what he thinks 
this new wisdom is and what it will do for him. 

Now to many scholars of our age Socrates was 
not much different from any other of these vota- 
ries of new-fangled ideas ; and, superficially, there 
is some basis for this fatal confusion. But the 
moment we apply to these wandering teachers 
the test of the three Socratic theses we see that in 
their attitude towards the central truth of philo- 
sophy they stood at the opposite pole from So- 
crates; we see, too, how deeply the intellectual 
and moral destiny of Greece was involved in this 
difference. 

Some of the sophists may have been inclined 
to dogmatic rationalism, and could therefore 
scarcely be called sceptics in any sense of the 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 17 

word. But for the most part they were question- 
ers and innovators by profession, in harmony with 
the eonmion imrest of the times. Their general 
position is fairly expressed in the famous maxim '^""^^^^^ 
of Protagoras, that "Man is the measure of all 
things." Such a principle might seem on its face Theaetetus 
— as it has seemed to certain modern critics — ^to It^^passim 
be in accord with Socrates' habit of putting the 
received laws of conduct to the test of human ex- 
perience ; and this indeed would be the case, were 
it not for the utterly diverse meanings that may 
be attached to the word "man." Now Protagoras 
had in mind to say that right and wrong are mat- 
ters of human opinion, being actually to each 
man as his good pleasure thinks them to be. 
More than that, they not only vary in their na- 
ture with the opinions of different men, but de- 
pend on the changing moods of each individual 
man, so that what is right and just for me at this 
moment may be at another moment the very re- 
verse of right and just. In other words, by 
"man" Protagoras meant the impression of the 
senses and the dictates of temperament, and vir- 
tually denied the existence of that unchanging 
law on which Socrates based his conduct when he 
declared himself ignorant of all things save of 
this one fact, that it is better for a man to be 
just than to be unjust, and better, if needs be, to 
suffer wrong than to do wrong. 

The issue between the two ways of life is 



Theaetetus 
162d 



18 PLATONISM 

brought out more sharply by adding to the 
Protagorean maxim already quoted his other fa- 
mous saying, that of the gods we have no know- 
ledge whether they are or are not, and by con- 
trasting with these statements the terse epigram 
of Plato, that, if we cared for our happiness. 
Laws 716c "Not auy man, as some say, but God would be the 
measure of all things." Plato, when he wrote 
these words in his old age, was thinking not so 
much of a deity set apart in a remote region of 
the heavens, or even of a deity immanent in the 
human breast, as of that element of the soul it- 
self which is capable of rendering a man like to a 
god. He, too, in his Way, was making man the 
measure of all things; but by man he had learnt 
from his master to think first, not of the opinions 
that separate one man from another, and a man 
today from himself of yesterday, but of the divine 
principle that is the same in all men and forms 
therefore the only true bond of friendship and so- 
ciety. It was just this principle of the innate 
divine that Protagoras denied — certainly at least 
Plato so understood him — when he made man the 
measure of truth and avowed that of the gods 
there was no way of knowing whether they were 
or were not. And, whatever apparent exceptions 
there may have been here and there, Protagoras 
was in this representative of the whole body of 
the sophists. By omitting the Socratic affirma- 
tion from their scheme they turned their philo- 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 19 

sophy, so far as they had any, in the direction of 
that Pyrrhonic scepticism which is the very con- 
trary of the Socratic. 

The same essential difference between So- 
crates and the sophists comes out when we pass 
from scepticism and spiritual affirmation to the 
third thesis. So far as it is possible to group to- 
gether men who formed no cohesive party, but 
professed each after his own desire, the sophists 
were at least in agreement among themselves in 
the behef that virtue and knowledge are some- 
how identical ; in fact it was their avowed mission 
to impart the knowledge requisite for virtue, as 
the thing virtue was commonly understood. And 
they had a useful function to perform. Their 
instruction was partly of a purely objective sort, 
and as such valuable in itself. As for their rhet- 
oric, Socrates did not hesitate to admit that he 
had acquired some of his perfectly legitimate 
skill in the use of words from Prodicus and other 
such teachers. And so, in the absence of schools 
beyond the most elementary sort, the sophists 
must enjoy the credit of sharing in the advance- 
ment of practical education. Even here, indeed, 
we begin to see the divergence between their 
method and that of Socrates, for Socrates was too 
genuinely sceptical, of himself as well as of oth- 
ers, to go about like an ambulatory imiversity 
lecturing for a fee on any province of science or 
art then known to mankind. But that is a minor 



20 PLATONISM 

matter. The serious divergence was in their pur- 
pose. If there is any truth in Plato's account of 
the debates between Socrates and such masters 
of the craft as Gorgias and Protagoras, it is clear 
that the sophists directed their instruction chiefly 
to the acquisition of skill in manipulating indi- 
vidual men and popular assemblies. I do not 
mean to say, following an ancient accusation, 
that the sophists set out deliberately to instruct 
men in the art of making the better cause appear 
the worse, in the sense that they had any vicious 
or anti-social end in view; but rather that they 
had in view no end at all, except the end of suc- 
cess. Their concern was very much with practi- 
cal cleverness and very little with moral conse- 
quences, very much with current opinion and very 
httle with truth for its own sake; hence the su- 
preme place of rhetoric in their curriculum, as 
the art of persuasion. They would have accepted 
as readily as Socrates the identification of vir- 
tue and knowledge; but they identified the two 
by making them both a means, without stopping 
to ask themselves or others the means to what. 
In the quest of that what Socrates was to pass 
his life ; and if he was still searching and had not 
reached the goal of the great quest when death 
put an end to all his asking, it was because he had 
not discovered the relation of the knowledge that 
determines virtue to the knowledge that belongs 
to scepticism and spiritual aflSrmation. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 21 

Such is the contrast between Socrates and the 
sophists the moment we apply to them the test 
of the three theses. To ignore this radical differ- 
ence in favor of the surface resemblances, as has 
been somewhat the practice since Grote's power- 
ful rehabilitation of the sophists, is to overlook 
the whole significance of the Socratic teaching, 
and it is to miss terribly the tragic lesson of his- 
tory. This was no paltry feud over scholastic 
terms, but the battle of one man who saw the 
truth and knew the consequences of error against 
a host of men who looked upon the truth with the 
eyes of a Pontius Pilate ; rather, it was the battle 
of one man for the deeper common sense of man- 
kind against the sophistries of a people that had 
lost its anchorage and was drifting it knew not 
whither. 

The Greeks are distinguished from other great 
peoples by their lack of any really sacred books 
or of a definite revelation ; and to this freedom of 
their imagination we owe a religion which of all 
religions is the most purely human and the most 
nearly universal, almost as full of meaning to- 
day, for those who understand it, as it was to the 
contemporaries of Socrates. But this freedom 
was a peril also, as all liberty is perilous. In an 
age of doubt and egoistic revolt from tradition 
such a religion, imless its deeper meaning meets 
with some authentication in the individual con- 
sciousness, is peculiarly liable to lose its moral 



22 PLATONISM 

hold and to become a plaything for the fancy of 
its votaries. This is the easy way; it was the di- 
rection in which the educated classes of Greece 
were naturally turning, and the Protagorean 
scepticism, with its flattering plausibility, was 
ready at hand to cloak moral indolence in the 
garb of philosophy. 

The Greeks, again, as we see them typified 
from the beginning in Odysseus, were inclined to 
cleverness and versatility more than to plain 
truth, and apt to lay weight on the value of 
worldly wisdom somewhat at the expense of in- 
stinctive rectitude. They were always a little too 
quick to applaud knowledge for its own sake and 
to measure virtue by the standard of success. 
And this disposition was fostered by the sophists 
at a critical moment of history. Plato laid his 
finger on one of the spots where the decay of na- 
tional character first discovered itself, when he 
phaednis 272d dcclarcd that for the rhetorician, trained to plead 
before the courts, there was no need to bother 
over the exact nature of justice and goodness, 
since no juror would take heed of such subtleties, 
but would be guided in his vote by the force of 
persuasion based on probability. Any one con- 
versant with the literature of the Greek people 
knows how large a place the word "probable" 
occupies in their whole manner of thinking, and 
how cunningly the sophistical game played with 
the national foible. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 23 

What came in the end of this itching cleverness 
and this adroit flattery can be read in the Roman 
estimate of Greece in her degeneracy : 

"Augur schoenobates medicus magus, 

omnia novit 
Graeculus esuriens; in caelum miseris, 

ibit."^ 
Or, if it seems unfair to accept the petulant sat- 
ire of Juvenal as historical evidence, some credit 
at least must be allowed to Cicero's comparison 
of Greek and Roman witnesses under oath. "He 
had," he says, in his oration Pro Flacco, "always 
been particularly addicted to that nation and 
their studies, and knew many modest and worthy 
men among them. But as to the sanctity of an 
oath, they had no notion of it; all their concern 
in giving evidence was, not how to prove, but 
how to express what they said. Whereas a 
Roman, in giving his testimony, was always 
jealous of himself, lest he should go too far; 
weighed all his words, and was afraid to let any- 
thing drop from him too hastily and passion- 
ately."^ Or still, if we hesitate to take the 

"^ Juvenal iii, 77. It is amusing to see how Dr. Johnson 
adapted the lines to what was a corresponding prejudice, 
in his day not entirely unwarranted, against the French: 

"They sing, they dance, clean shoes, or cure a clap; 
All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows, 
And, bid him go to heU, to heU he goes." 

^ Abridged from Middleton's paraphrase, Life of Cicero 
I, 300, ed. 1741. 



24 PLATONISM 

Roman estimate of a conquered and subject 
people, there is the direct statement of Polybius,^ 
himself a Greek, as to the slipperiness of the 
Greek character resulting from their rejection of 
the restraints of religion. 

All this was involved in the difference between 
Socrates and the sophists; and unless we see 
clearly how the destiny of the Athenian people, 
and one might say of the world, was at stake, we 
shall make nonsense of the solemnity with which 
Apology 30d Socrates proclaimed his mission: "Therefore,© 
men of Athens, I am not concerned to plead for 
myself, as one might expect of me, but am rather 
pleading for you, lest by condenming me in your 
ignorance you throw away God's gift to you. . . . 
That I am really such an one given to the city by 
God, you may understand from my life ; for it is 
not from merely human motives that I neglect 
my own affairs and see them going to waste these 
many years, while I look imweariedly to your 
interests, and come to you all individually, as if 
I were a father or an elder brother, with my 
message and persuasion of virtue." Such was 
the last pubhc profession of Socrates, and it was 
not heard. This is not to say that the general de- 
cline of Greek civilization should be attributed to 
any special class of men as the deliberate source 
of corruption. The serious corrupters of youth, 

® History vi, 54, 55. See also the use made of this pas- 
sage by Warburton in his Divine Legation 1, 408. 



THE SOCRATIC THESES 25 

to use the phrase of the indictment against So- 
crates, were not the sophists, as Plato himself 
admits, but the mass of the people, who were ^^4^2''.!''' 
jealous of any distinction that ran counter to 
their own ideas, and made resistance to the course 
they were pursuing extremely difficult, even dan- 
gerous. The pity of it was that at this moment 
of intellectual curiosity and moral restlessness, 
when many generous minds here and there had 
caught glimpses of a higher law than tradition 
and needed to be encouraged in their quest of 
truth, the accredited teachers of the land should 
have disappointed the searchers and left them 
without any power of united resistance. The 
condemnation of the sophists, as a body, is not 
that they turned the current of thought in a new 
direction, but that they were themselves so deeply 
imtmersed in the popular tide, and lent their 
weight to its onward sweep. 

Unless this is true there is no meaning at all in 
those earher Dialogues of Plato in which he at- 
tacks the rhetoric of the sophists as being no 
genuine art, but only one of the many branches 
of popular flattery, like cooking and the rest. 
When he wrote these Dialogues, the particular 
men with whom Socrates had contended were no 
longer living, but the evil they had fostered was 
very much alive, was even growing daily more 
manifest to any one who looked beneath the sur- 
face of things. Hence the note of bitterness and 



Gorgias 
passim 



26 PLATONISM 

occasionally of despondence in the writings of 
the one man who saw to the heart of the contrast 
between Socrates and the sophists, and, knowing 
he had failed to convert his own generation to 
the Socratic doctrine, did not know that he was 
establishing this doctrine for future ages as the 
Tiraaeus 47b iudcf cctiblc sourcc of philosophy, "than which no 
greater good has come or ever will come to mortal 
men." 

Out of the depths of his inner life Socrates had 
arrived at the conviction of three truths, two of 
which, scepticism and spiritual affirmation, were, 
as we have seen, intimately associated, while the 
third, the rationalistic identification of virtue and 
knowledge, stood in apparently unrelated isola- 
tion. It was the task of his successor to expound 
these theses in a way that should force their ac- 
ceptance upon any man who looked honestly into 
his own breast, and to carry them up to a point 
at which they should all three meet in a single 
harmonious system of philosophy. I do not 
mean that Plato saw the task lying before him 
in this limited and systematic form: his mind 
was too elastic, and his outlook on life too 
crowded with images of men and their destinies, 
to be confined in any formula however large. I 
mean rather that these theses were his funda- 
mental conviction, as they were of Socrates — the 
skeleton, so to speak, which, more or less con- 
cealed, gave shape and strength and coherence to 



THE SOCRATOC THESES 27 

all his thought. And we on our part, if we may 
borrow Plato's license in shifting a metaphor, 
we, who would "swim through such and so great ^^^^^j^'^^^ 
a sea of words" as stretches before us in the Di- 
alogues, can find no safer light to guide us than 
these three motives to philosophy which he him- 
self took from his master. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SOCRATIC QUEST 

The fidelity with which Plato brings out the 
threefold impulse of Socrates to philosophy is 
evidence in itself that the same motives were at 
work in his own mind. But they are equally 
manifest in passages from which the biographical 
element is entirely absent. The theoretical basis 
of his scepticism may be left until we take up the 
discussion of his attitude towards metaphysics; 
here it will be sufficient to call attention to the 
note of profound disillusion running all through 
his works, and growing stronger with his age. 
^^048^°^° "The doings of men," he declares at the end of his 
life, "are not worthy of great seriousness, yet it is 
\ necessary to be serious; and this is our misfort- 
une. . . . Men are for the most part puppets, 
and little is their share of truth." Socrates, I 
think, would never have spoken in just that tone 
of bitterness, born of a longer and sadder know- 
ledge; but Plato's words, nevertheless, spring 
^^6e'''"" from the same vein of sceptical irony as that 
which he had so often seen his master display in 
common intercourse. So deeply ingrained is this 
note of doubt or hesitation in the Dialogues that 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 29 

the leaders of the Academy after Plato's death 
passed by an easy transition into a form of scept- 
icism barely distinguishable from that of the fol- 
lowers of Pyrrho. These men, if we may accept 
the verdict^ of a late critic, justified their posi- 
tion, in part, by Plato's own fondness for such 
terms as "the probable" {to eikos), thereby forc- 
ing his philosophy into accord with the teaching 
of the sophists — an irony of Fate comparable to 
that which brought about the condemnation of 
Socrates as a sophist. 

As for spiritual affirmation, Plato's language 
is fairly exultant with the faith in righteousness 
as the one thing which a man may safely assert, 
against all appearances, to be always desirable. 
Even above his magnificent art of exposition and 
dialectic, his real power of persuasion, for those 
who have ears to hear, lies in the earnestness of 
this direct and unwavering affirmation. When 
Socrates, in gaol and awaiting the hour of execu- 
tion, was urged by his dear friend Crito to bribe 
his way to hberty, he closed his memorable state- 
ment of the self-imposed obligations of duty with 
a simile borrowed from the experience of relig- 
ious devotees. "These things," he said, "I seem crito s4d 
to hear as the Corybantes think they hear the 
sound of flutes, and the echo of these words keeps 

^ Prolegomena § 10. This treatise, whether by Olympi- 
odorus or another, is by no means negligible for the 
modern student. 



30 PLATONISM 

up such a humming in my ears as quite to drown 
out any contrary arguments." So it is today 
with the understanding reader of the Platonic 
Dialogues; he is like one who has hearkened to 
the same incantation of magic flutes, the very 
memory of which is able to overpower all the dis- 
tracting voices of the world. But Plato was not 
writing only for the anima naturaliter Platonica, 
As a teacher needing withal to maintain his doc- 
trine logically against the attack of adversaries, 
he could not rest in a bare affirmation; he was 
bound to discover some authority for his faith, 
some definition of this higher knowledge, to which 
reason, if honest with itself, would at least will- 
ingly assent. 

Furthermore, the tendency to a positive ration- 
alism was as strong in Plato as it was in Socrates. 
His belief in the simple identification of virtue 
and knowledge is constantly coming to the sur- 
860D s face in his writings, and even in the Laws he is 
still reasoning on the f amihar Socratic thesis that 
no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only through 
ignorance. Now, as I have said, such a maxim 
seems on its face to run counter to the known 
motives of human conduct, since any man, if 
questioned on his conduct, will admit that he 
often does wrong against the knowledge of what 
he knows to be best for him. Here, then, is an 
issue between philosophy and apparent fact; and 
if you solve this difficulty by explaining the equa- 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 31 

tion of virtue and knowledge after the manner of 
the utiHtarians, as Socrates and Plato did, you 
forthwith lay yourself open to the charge of 
throwing away your spiritual affirmation. 

At the outset of his philosophical career Plato 
was thus beset with the double problem, first of 
justifying separately his rationalism and his 
higher intuition, and then of harmonizing these 
two seemingly contradictory positions. So far as 
we can conjecture from the records, Socrates 
himself had faced and solved the problem of 
rationalism raised by his identification of virtue 
and knowledge, and to this extent Plato, in writ- 
ing his Dialogues, had only to repeat and clarify 
the steps of what may be called the Socratic 
Quest. But at this point Socrates ceased to be 
an expositor of his own philosophy: for the justi- 
fication of spiritual insight before the bar of rea- 
son, which may be called the Platonic Quest, and 
for the relation of insight and rationahsm, which 
had been left as the Socratic Paradox, Plato had 
to rely on his own resources of argument. Our 
study of Platonism, therefore, will follow this 
order: taking up first the Socratic Quest, we shall 
pass then to the Platonic Quest, and from these 
proceed to the Socratic Paradox. Or, expressed 
in the language of the three theses, our task is, 
first, to deal with the rationaHstic identification 
of virtue and knowledge, secondly to see how 
scepticism leads from this thesis to spiritual af- 



32 PLATONISM 

firmation, and, thirdly, to discover how this ra- 
tionalism and affirmation can be held together. 

Now, there is a group of Dialogues, almost 
certainly the earliest written, in which Plato is 
engaged in pursuing the Socratic Quest, as if 
lured on by a goal already clearly enough seen 
and within easy reach, yet at the same time with 
glimpses of another goal beyond, still wrapped in 
the haze of distance. None of these Dialogues is 
conclusive, and at the end of each the reader is 
left in a mood like that of the ancient Persian, 
who complained that he had heard great argu- 
ment 

"About it and about, but evermore 
Came out by the same door where in he went." 

Meanwhile, however, these Dialogues wind in 
and out of their theme with such delightful ease, 
and gather by the way so many charming pictures 
of Athenian manners, that they might well be 
named the idylls of philosophy. Indeed, if I may 
confess my private taste, I almost at times hold 
them more precious than those greater Dialogues 
in which Plato no longer speaks as an inquirer 
but as a perfect master. For Truth, it may be, 
is to be worshipped at a distance, a creature so 
high and divine that no man, not even a Plato, 
can lay hands on her without a little soiling her 
robes. And these early Dialogues, as I assume 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 33 

/ them to be, have the peculiar fascination of sug- 
gesting the truth to us as something certain yet 
unapproached. 

Each of them sets out to define a particular 
virtue — Charmides temperance, Laches bravery, 
Euthyphro holiness, Lysis friendship — and ends 
by rejecting as inadequate or inconsistent the 
various proposed definitions. But through all 
their inconclusiveness, these two thoughts are 
continually before the mind: that in some way 
which the debaters cannot understand the differ- 
ent virtues are distinct from one another, yet at 
the same time merely aspects of one all-embracing 
virtue; and, secondly, that in some way, equally 
obscure to the debaters, this one inclusive virtue 
is dependent on knowledge. 

A glance at one of these early Dialogues will 
indicate the character of all. In the Charmides 
we find a boy of this name presented by his elder 
cousin and guardian, Critias, to Socrates as a 
perfect specimen of that comeliness and grace 
and modesty, imited with strength and self- 
mastery, which gave to the youth of that age and 
land their peculiarly androgynous charm. He is 
the embodiment of the much-lauded and much- 
desired virtue of sophrosyne, which, for lack of a 
better equivalent, we translate "temperance." 
And Socrates, having introduced the topic by one 
of his dramatic ruses, proceeds to question the 
lad about this virtue, insinuating that he ought to 



34 PLATONISM 

be able to define it if it is really in his possession. 
Temperance, replies the boy, after some hesita- 
tion, is a way of doing things sedately, a kind of 
quietness or slowness in action. And so the dis- 
cussion begins ; for, in his usual manner, Socrates 
finds difficulties in this definition. Certainly, he 
says, and Charmides admits, temperance is one 
of the fair and excellent things {ton halon) ; yet 
we should not bestow such epithets upon a person 
who learned his lesson or ran a race slowly, but 
upon one who was swift and agile. The lad, thus 
driven from his first definition, tries another: it 
is, he thinks, a kind of true shame or modesty. 
But again, objects Socrates, surely temperance 
is a good thing, as well as a fair thing, and, as 
Homer has declared, modesty is not always good 
for a man who is in need. And so once more the 
boy and his examiner seem to have reached an 
impasse. 

Now, a plain unimaginative man like Grote 
will see little profit in this sort of word-play be- 
yond its tendency to shake the ignorant out of 
their confidence ; and there is that in this first part 
of the Dialogue — and something more. It is an 
admirable example of the superficial sophistry to 
which Plato sometimes descends, whether wit- 
tingly or unwittingly, while the conclusion he has 
in view is perfectly sound. The fallacy lies in 
the ambiguous use of such words as "fair" and 
"good," which retain their practical popular 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 35 

meaning as applied to the specific acts of men, 
while they include also hints and admonitions of 
a deeper sense as touching the purpose underly- 
ing any specific act. All temperance is good? 
Yes. Then it follows, if goodness is such a thing, 
simple and invisible, as it is becoming in Plato's 
rational system, that all good is temperance, and 
all good is bravery, and so with the other specific 
virtues. In a word there is only one morahty, 
into which all the virtues are merged indistin- 
guishably, and any attempt to define or apply a 
specific virtue will result in confusions and con- 
tradictions. But then virtue that cannot be de- 
fined or applied is rather an aerial commodity for 
this workaday world; and so, where are we? Of 
course Charmides might have retorted that he 
was employing the word "good" in one sense and 
his interlocutor in another; but this would have 
demanded a power of analysis quite beyond his 
years — a power, in fact, which his literary creator 
had not yet attained, or which he most artfully 
concealed. 

At this point the argument of the Charmides 
takes another turn. At the secret suggestion of 
his cousin the lad asks Socrates what he has to 
say of this definition: "Temperance is doing 
one's own business"? That sounds well; but it 
does not take Socrates long to bring out its in- 
adequacy, for how can doing one's own business 
be temperance until a man first decides whether 



36 PLATONISM 

what he is doing is beneficial or the contrary? He 
might be doing himself an injury while thinking 
a certain act was his business, and, manifestly, it 
cannot be acting temperately to do oneself an 
injury. Before a man can be temperate, there- 
fore, he must know himself and his business. 
Here Critias takes up the challenge, and avers 
that temperance is just the sort of knowledge im- 
plied in Socrates' queries: it is self-knowledge. 
Moreover, he has a divine sanction for this defi- 
nition, and from a source that must appeal 
strongly to Socrates ; for the God of Delphi who 
meets the worshipper at the threshold of the 
temple with the inscription "Know thyself" is 
not issuing a command, but pronouncing a salu- 
tation after the manner of our "Hail," "Be well," 
and to be well is the same as to be temperate. By 
his manner of salutation, therefore, the God is 
instructing us that to know oneself and to be 
well and to be temperate are all one and the same 
virtue. Thus, by an easy transition, we have the 
argument slipping from the question whether the 
virtues are all one to the question whether virtue, 
this particular virtue of temperance at least, is 
not identical with knowledge. Critias, in asso- 
ciating virtue with self-knowledge, might seem to 
have reached the goal of the quest, but he is soon 
thrown by Socrates into embarrassment because 
he is unable to analyse the ambiguity lurking in 
the word "knowledge" similar to that which en- 
tangled Charmides in the use of the "good." 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 37 

Under the cross-questioning of Socrates this 
knowledge which Critias identifies with temper- 
ance proves to be, not the knowledge of anything 
definite, such as that which we obtain from sight 
or sound, but just a knowledge of knowledge and 
of ignorance. Eut where is the profit in this in- 
substantial sort of knowledge? How, for in- 
stance, shall the possessor of this knowledge be 
able to distinguish the pretender in medicine from 
the true physician? To do this he will have to 
know some of the marks of the physician's art, 
something about health and disease, and this is a 
very different sort of thing from the knowledge 
of knowledge, whatever that may mean. And so 
it is with temperance; if we define this virtue as 
knowledge, it must be knowledge of some specific 
way of profiting ourselves, and not that mere 
empty knowing that we know or do not know. 

The argument is all a tangle, in which we have 
become involved by the treacherous words "good- 
ness" and "knowledge." Yet we are left with a 
hint of the way of escape, given in the last beauti- 
ful address of Socrates to the youth whose virtue 
was the occasion of all this seeking and doubting : 
"I would advise you to regard me as a babbling 
fellow unable to reason anything out, and of 
yourself to believe that, as you are more temper- 
ate, so you are happier." 

Simple as this last sentence may soimd, it is 
pregnant with meaning. After the fruitless 



38 PLATONISM 

arguing forwards and backwards, it awakens in 
us the sensation of one who has been long wan- 
dering in a blind labyrinth, and suddenly comes 
upon an opening in the wall through which he 
descries lying before him a clear and spacious 
garden. So strong is this impression that we 
should be tempted to believe Plato had written 
the Dialogue deliberately as a puzzle, having in 
his hand all the while the clues not only of the 
Socratic Quest in which he is engaged, but of the 
larger Quest that is to follow, were it not for the 
two great arguments of the Protagoras and the 
Gorgias, which seem to come after the Charmides 
and its group in time and to represent the author 
as still searching. 

Much of the Protagoras is like the debate of 
the earliest Dialogues, only wider in dramatic 
scope. The sophist who gives his name to the 
piece maintains that the virtues are separate. Be- 
ing separate, they cannot be embraced under any 
single category such as knowledge, yet they can, 
he thinks, be imparted by instruction. Socrates 
holds that they are all a form of knowledge, and 
so not many but one; and as they are identical 
with knowledge, he would like to believe that 
they are teachable, but is troubled because he can 
find no teachers from whom you can learn them 
as you can acquire the various arts from prac- 
titioners. The two disputants are thus complete- 
ly at cross purposes, and the reader is likely to 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST S9 

be vexed at their apparent stupidity in missing 
the occasions of coming to agreement. For ex- 
ample, Protagoras has been forced to admit that 
three of the virtues — justice, hohness, temper- 
ance — are at least pretty closely akin, being all 
reducible to wisdom, or knowledge; but he still 
clings to his theory that the fourth virtue, 
bravery, is quite apart from the others. Where- 
upon Socrates proceeds to show that bravery 
too can be reduced to knowledge; since, as a 
virtue, it should not be confused with the 
headlong impulse of the unthinking animal, 
and can be nothing more than wisdom regard- 
ing what is dangerous and what is not. At 
this point Protagoras takes refuge in silence, and 
the discussion comes to an end. Yet how easy, 
the reader is likely to say to himself with some 
impatience, it would have been for Protagoras to 
retort: Very good, my dear teaser; no doubt 
bravery is dependent on knowledge, just as tem- 
perance and holiness are, but just observe your 
own addition — "regarding what is dangerous and 
what is not" ; it is this very regarding that makes 
the virtues different applications of knowledge, 
and so not one but separate. The retort is easy ; 
yet beware. Unless you have got clearly defined 
in your understanding this slippery thing called 
knowledge, your questioner will attack you from 
another side, and you will fall a victim to his cun- 
ning, as Protagoras had already fallen in trying 



40 PLATONISM 

to explain how the knowledge of virtue is im- 
parted in instruction. 

So far, then, we seem not to have escaped from 
the labyrinth of the group of Dialogues in which 
the Charmides is included. But there is one im- 
portant addition to be noted. This you may 
know, said Socrates at the close of the Charmides, 
that you will be happier as you are more temper- 
ate. Now, in the Protagoras for the first time, 
Plato takes up this further identification of virtue 
and knowledge with the sum of pleasures which, 
in ordinary language, is named happiness. We 
cannot get away from this one fact, Socrates 
argues, that the feeling of pleasure is in itself 
good and that pain is in itself bad; hence we seem 
to have here a sure criterion of the rightness or 
wrongness of our acts, in the result — ^not, of 
course, the immediate consequence but the final 
result — as shown by the balance of pleasure and 
pain. Virtue is reduced to a pure hedonism 
(from hedone, pleasure), dependent on a man's 
ability to calculate and weigh his sensations pres- 
ent and future. If, therefore, men are to be per- 
suaded to follow justice and holiness and tem- 
perance, they must be taught that such a course of 
life in its totality imparts more pleasure than the 
contrary course. The conclusion may be given 
in the excellent language of Bishop Berkeley's 
use of this argument to undermine the logic of 
those who make hedonism an excuse for vice: 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 41 

"But Socrates, who was no country parson, sus- 
pected your men of pleasure were such through 
ignorance of the art of reckoning. It was his 
opinion (Plato in Protagoras) that rakes cannot 
reckon. And that for want of this skill they 
make wrong judgments about pleasure, on the 
right choice of which their happiness depends. 
To make a right computation, should you not 
consider all the faculties and all the kinds of 
pleasure, taking into your account the future as 
well as the present, and rating them all accord- 
ing to their true value? And all these points 
duly considered, will not Socrates seem to have 
had reason on his side, when he thought ignor- 
ance made rakes, and particularly their being 
ignorant of what he calls the science of more and 
less, greater and smaller, equaUty and compari- 
son, that is to say of the art of computing?"^ 

Manifestly, the argument has reached here a 
certain conclusion, the Socratic Quest has 
touched the goal. Virtue is an act which will re- 
sult in the greater sum of pleasure, and he will be 
the virtuous man who has the knowledge that 
enables him to calculate the consequences of his 
conduct, and strike a balance in the terms of 
sensation. Knowledge has been defined by the 
content of pleasure and pain, and by such a defi- 
nition we can say that no man errs, or sins, will- 
ingly, but only through ignorance. This, ap- 

^ Alciphron II, xviii, abridged. 



42 PLATONISM 

parently, is the form in which Socrates held his 
thesis, and it has maintained its position in the 
world to this day; since Bentham formulated the 
utilitarianism of the eighteenth century it may 
even be regarded as the dominant theory of 
ethics, however it may have disguised itself by 
various additions and verbal modifications. And, 
in a way, when combined, as it was in the teach- 
ing of Socrates, with another truth of an utterly 
different order, it contains a kernel of truth. But 
taken alone as complete in itself, as it is professed 
by the utilitarian and as it was expressed in the 
Protagoras, it certainly is inadequate, if not false. 
What assurance is there that any man, by his 
own judgment or even by the collective exper- 
ience of society, shall be able at any critical mo- 
ment to foresee the long series of consequences 
that may follow a particular act, or shall be wise 
enough to determine coldly, amid the warm solici- 
tations of present desire, where the remote bal- 
ance of pleasure and pain will lie? Such a calcu- 
lation is but a fumbling guide at best; unless 
fortified by a higher truth it is likely to bring us, 
indeed in the end it has invariably brought men, 
to the Pyrrhonic form of scepticism, which 
thrusts aside the uncertainties of the far future, 
and seeks for tranquilhty in accepting with a 
kind of stoic Epicureanism the pleasure in sight 
as the only reality — 

"Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go." 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 43 

But that is not the scepticism of Socrates, nor is 
this the goal to which Plato's mind is moving 
with the steady sweep of tidal waters drawn on- 
ward by a celestial force. What is this thing 
called pleasm^e which we have so lightly accepted 
as the sole arbiter of life? That is the question 
agitated in the GorgiaSj and never afterwards 
forgotten by Plato. 

By a roundabout way the discussion of the 
Gorgias is brought at last to a sharp dispute be- 
tween Calhcles, on the one part, portrayed as a 
typical demagogue of the day, a man interested 
superficially in philosophical questions, but at 
heart an agnostic and egotist seeking for a Uf e of 
pleasure through power, and, on the other part, 
Socrates, represented here as the customary iron- 
ist, but with new resources of sarcasm for those 
who try to humiliate him and of stirring appeal 
for those who will heed. The brief for pleasure, 
which in the Protagoras was held by Socrates, is 
now put into the mouth of Calhcles, in order to 
demonstrate its insufficiency when carried to the 
logical end, while Socrates, as usual, is made the 
vehicle of Plato's expanding thought — von Aen- 
derungen zu hoheren Aenderungen. 

This talk about temperance and righteousness, 
says Callicles, with a cynicism that reminds us of 
certain latter-day prophets, is all humbug : 

"The nobility and justice of nature, as I now 491E s 
tell you boldly, is really this, that a man who 



44 PLATONISM 

would live rightly should permit his desires to 
grow to the uttermost and not temper them by 
discipline; and when they have thus grown he 
should be able to serve them by reason of his cour- 
age and wisdom, and satisfy any longing that 
may arise. But this is impossible for the mob. 
Hence, for shame, they conceal their own im- 
potence by blaming such men, and say that in- 
temperance is a dishonourable thing, as I declared 
before, thus reducing the better natures to 
slavery. And, being incapable of satisfying their 
longing for pleasure, they praise temperance and 
justice, for their own lack of manhood. Suppose 
a man were bom the son of a king, or were cap- 
able by his own nature of making himself a king 
or tyrant or ruler, what, in the name of truth, 
would be worse or more dishonourable than tem- 
perance or justice for such a man — for a man, I 
say, who, when he might enjoy the good things of 
life and there was no one to hinder, should bring 
in the conmion opinion and reason and censure 
of the mob as a master over himself? And would 
he not be a wretched creature if he were so sub- 
dued by the specious honour of justice and tem- 
perance as not to grant advantages to his friends 
over his enemies, in the city where he himself was 
ruling? No, Socrates, the truth is — and you pro- 
fess yourself a votary of the truth — that luxury 
and intemperance and liberty, these, if they are 
supported, are virtue and happiness; the rest is 
fopperies, the unnatural conventions of society, 
idle chatter." 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 45 

Very good, replies Socrates, we have got down 
to the real point at issue; and he proceeds to 
draw inferences from this definition of virtue in 
a way that causes his antagonist to squirm with 
indignation. If pleasure is all, and there is no 
criterion beyond it, what should hinder a man 
from indulging himself in practices which can 
scarcely be named, which, in fact, we do not name 
today? Nor was there anything unfair in so 
pressing the argument. We need only look at 
the actual life in Athens, or in the Italian cities 
of the Renaissance, to learn that it is perfectly 
possible for a man to gratify his lowest and vilest 
desires without losing that sense of pleasure 
which the hedonist makes his norm of conduct. 
These grosser pursuits cannot be rejected on the 
ground that a true calculation, so long as it con- 
fines itself to a purely quantitative estimation of 
pleasure and pain, finds them in the end on the 
wrong side of the ledger. Such a reckoning may 
save a man from excess ; it will not teach him to 
renounce any pleasure in itself. Callicles is 
decent enough to admit that some pleasures are 
in themselves better than others, and having thus 
granted the existence of the good, or the honour- 
able, as a standard outside of pleasures by which 
we may grade them, he has virtually given up his 
case. 

It is at this point that Socrates utters his ironi- 
cally exultant cry, "Joy! joy!" — as it were a 499b 



46 PLATONISM 

prophetic note of triumph over the hosts of 
sophistry. That is one of the great moments of 
philosophy, the moment when we pass from the 
Soeratic Quest to the Platonic Quest; and I 
never read the exclamation put into the mouth of 
Socrates, but I think of the shout of Achilles, 
when he came from his tent and stood by the 
trench, with the divine splendour radiating about 
him. The real battle was yet to come, but there 
was terror in the walls of Troy. 

"Seeing, then," says Socrates, taking up the 
argument formally, "that we have agreed to- 
gether, you and I, that there is such a thing as 
the good and such a thing as the pleasant, and 
that the pleasant is not the same as the good, and 
that each is acquired by a certain attention and 
mode of action, according as we set out after the 
pleasant or the good — but before I proceed, tell 
me whether you say yes or no to all this." And 
Callicles, like a man brought to bay, says yes. 
Whereupon Socrates returns to the points on 
which they had differed, and now, fortified by this 
concession of Callicles, pronoimces the verdict 
and throws back the slurs of his antagonist, in a 
way that has never failed to hearten good men 
against the slanders and insults of unscrupulous 
power: 

507b "And so, Callicles, we come to this necessary 
conclusion, that the temperate man, being, as we 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 47 

have described him, just and brave and holy, is 
entirely good; and the good man must do well 
and honourably whatever he does, and he who is 
doing well must be blessed and happy ^ and the 
bad man who is doing ill must be miserable. . . . 
Well, then, either this argument of ours must be 
refuted, that men are made happy by the posses- 
sion of temperance and justice, and miserable by 
the possession of evil, or, if the argimient is true, 
we must regard the consequences. . . . We must 
consider whether you were right or wrong in your 
abusive taunts, to the effect that I am unable to 
defend myself or any of my friends or family, or 
to save them from the extremity of danger, be- 
ing, Hke an outlaw, at the mercy of any one who 
chooses to buffet me on the ear, if I may repeat 
your insulting words, or to deprive me of my 
property, or banish from the city, or, worst of 
all, kill me. Such a state, you declare, is the most 
shameful a man can be in. But I say, as I have 
often said, and there is no reason why I should 
not say it again — I say, O Callicles, the most 
shameful thing is not to be buffeted on the ear 
unjustly, nor to have my face or purse cut; but 
it is a worse thing and more shameful to buffet 
me and slash me and mine unjustly, and to rob / 
and abuse my body or my house. In a word, to 
do any injustice to me and mine is a worse thing 
and more shameful for the one who does the in- 
justice than for me the sufferer. This is the 
truth as it appeared to us in our former discus- 
sion, and is now made fast and bound, if I may 
use a bold metaphor, in proofs of iron and ada- 



'/ 



48 PLATONISM 

mant. So at least it should seem; unless you, or 
some one more audacious than you, should suc- 
ceed in arguing fairly against what I am now 
saying. For as for me, my word is always the 
same: that I do not know how these things are, 
but that of all the men I have ever met, as now, 
no one has been able to say otherwise without 
making himself ridiculous." 

Thus, after taking a fall out of one adversary 
and then another, Socrates is at liberty to profess 
his tremendous affirmation of the moral life, in 
a tone very different from that of the calculating 
argument employed with Protagoras. But ob- 
serve the door by which he has finally slipped into 
this new region. Weigh the sentence italicized 
above, by which the passage has been made, for 
it is the keynote of Platonism, the despair of the 
petty logician, the joy of the initiated: "He who 
is doing well must be blessed and happy, and the 
bad man who is doing ill must be miserable."^ 
Now on its face this is no argument at all, but a 
bit of outrageous sophistry turning on the am- 
biguity of a phrase. To do well in Greek means 
both to prosper, he fortunate, and to act right- 
eously, justly } Callicles would have been ready 
from the first to grant that to do well in the sense 

^"Oo-TC TToA-X^ dvayKr) . . . rbv 8' cv irpaTTOvra fjuaKapiov T€ 
KoX €vBaifiova etvai, tov Se Trovrjpov kol KaKws irpaTTOvra ddkiov. 

* In the preceding debate with Polus the argument 
(474c £f) had taken a similar turn by means of the 
ambiguity of the word kukov. 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 49 

of being fortunate is to he happy — naturally ; but 
if he now makes no objection to the other mean- 
ing, that to do well in the sense of acting justly 
is to he happy, it is because he has been brow- 
beaten by Socrates into a state of submissiveness. 
To understand the full scope of this silent admis- 
sion we must briefly recapitulate the argument. 

Callicles had begun by drawing a distinction 
between nature (physis) and tradition (nomos) . 
Nature is what we know by our inmiediate indi- 
vidual sense, that is by natural feeling; tradition 
is what we have not learned from our indi- 
vidual experience, but accept as the opinion, 
or common sense, of mankind. Nature, he con- 
tends, tells us that happiness depends upon the 
amount of pleasure we can wring out of life, and 
not upon the means by which we obtain this 
pleasure; therefore, in nature, it is better to be 
unjust than to be just. Against this precept of 
nature the law of tradition, or conmaon sense, that 
it is better to be just than to be unjust, has no 
weight for any one who is cognizant of the facts, 
since it is merely an opinion which we try to make 
prevail with others, for our own advantage and 
not at all for theirs. The problem of philosophy, 
therefore, unless it should be content with a 
brutal form of hedonism, was to confirm the 
authority of the popular verdict, and to prove 
that it is true also in nature.^ 

^ For this contrast of nature and common sense, or com- 
mon opinion, see Laws 659d, 889e, et passim. 



50 PLATONISM 

Socrates, as we have seen, takes hold of the 
distinction thus drawn, and so entangles Callicles 
in his logic that at last he is obliged to accede to 
a qualitative difference in pleasures and to a cri- 
terion of life apart from them and above them. 
So far the discussion is perfectly fair, and to this 
extent Callicles has been forced by sound reason- 
ing to admit that the popular conmion-sense 
opinion is also true by the test of his own feelings. 
We do know for a fact that one pleasure is bet- 
ter, in the sense that we naturally call it more 
just, than another. But the next step, that our 
happiness depends on this new qualitative cri- 
terion, rather than the quantity of pleasure, is not 
argued at all; it is merely slipped through by a 
verbal ambiguity, owing to the bewilderment into 
which Callicles has been thrown. The phrase 
doing well merges together the two standards of 
nature and common sense — to be happy by pros- 
pering is a thesis of nature, whereas to be happy 
by acting justly is a thesis of common sense — 
and, however it was with Callicles, Plato should 
not have let this confusion pass without com- 
ment. But neither here nor anywhere else in the 
Dialogue does the author show himself aware of 
the fallacy. Instead of bringing evidence to 
prove that the common-sense view is also true by 
the experience of each individual man, he allows 
Socrates to maintain his position by the mere arm 
of an invincible scepticism : "So at least it should 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 51 

seem; unless you, or some one more audacious 
than you, should succeed in arguing fairly 
against what I am now saying. For as for me, 
my word is always the same, that I do not know 
how these things are, but that of all the men I 
have ever met, as now, no one has been able to say 
otherwise without making himself ridiculous." 

It is something — a great thing, no doubt — ^to 
have raised the common opinion of mankind to 
the solemn utterance of a spiritual affirmation, 
supported by the powers of scepticism; but this 
is still not philosophy, however it may be the basis 
of philosophy. Common sense may be right, but 
so long as it cannot tell "how these things are," 
cannot, that is, give an account of itself dialectic- 
ally, it is open to attack and discomfiture. Now, 
so far from being able to give an account of itself, 
conmion sense is painfully aware of its unaided 
inabiUty to square its verdict with the visible facts 
of life, and is continually taking refuge in the ex- 
pected reversals of an invisible world hereafter. 
It declares that the just man must prosper and 
be happy, and in this declaration it never wavers ; 
yet it beholds everywhere the prizes of the race 
going to the strong and unscrupulous, and in its 
distress it prays to God for vengeance on the 
wicked and for help to the righteous. So it was 
not only in Greece but the world over; and so it 
is today. How marvellously, for example, the 
trust and despair of religion were combined in 



52 PLATONISM 

the Jewish Psahns, and how legitimately our 
worship has adapted those outcries to its sense of 
present defeat and future victory, any one may 
understand by reading the great sermon of New- 
man on the Condition of the Members of the 
Christian Church. 

And this is precisely the position of Plato in 
the Gorgias. Beside the magnificent profession 
of Socrates that the just man is happy, he sets 
Callicles' picture of the just man as he may be 
actually seen on this earth, buffeted and scorned, 
unable to protect himself against the machina- 
tions of evil ; and, beyond the quibble of a phrase, 
Plato has no positive logic to prove that Socrates, 
in this point, is right. Whether conscious or not 
of this defect in the argument, he turns for his 
vindication from philosophy to mythology, flee- 
ing, like the Christian Church, to faith in the 
power of another world to make good the dis- 
harmony of this. The Dialogue concludes with 
an account of the pagan day of judgment, when 
the naked soul stands, with all its secrets revealed, 
before the tribunal of Aeacus and Radamanthys 
and Minos, and, as these pronounce, is sentenced 
to reward or punishment. "For this," Socrates 
says, "was the law [nomos, the divine ratification 
of nomos as common sense] concerning men un- 
der Cronus, and is now and always among the 
gods, that he who has passed through this life in 
justice and hoHness goes after death to the Isl- 



THE SOCRATIC QUEST 53 

ands of the Blessed, there to dwell in perfect hap- 
piness beyond the range of evil, whereas he who 
has lived wickedly and atheistically departs to 
the prison-house of vengeance and judgment." 

So far Plato has come in the Quest: he has 
shown that the popular view of morality has the 
sanction of religion, and that, if only the myth 
of future retribution be true, then certainly it is 
better, measured by the ordinary standard of hap- 
piness, to be just than to be unjust. But what if 
the myth be rejected? The effort to confirm this 
verdict philosophically, by an argument based on 
the immediate knowledge of men, here and now, 
will be the task of The Republic, If Plato suc- 
ceeds in reaching this goal, then the ambiguity of 
the phrase by which Callicles in the Gorgias was 
tricked into acquiescence will prove to contain no 
fallacy, but the truth of philosophy as it is ex- 
pressed by the instinctive common sense of man- 
kind. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PLATONIC QUEST 

The Republic is the richest book of philosophy 
ever yet composed. In its wide scope there is 
scarcely an important question of human life 
that is not touched on ; ethics, psychology, meta- 
physics, science, education, art, religion — every- 
thing is here. Impressed by this diversity of in- 
terests, the pedant has undertaken to analyse the 
work into separate treatises written at different 
times ; and the casual reader, in his bewilderment, 
is likely to ask himself whether the whole thing is 
not the random outpouring of a powerful but il- 
logical brain, the creation, perhaps, of a poet who 
has taken up the ungrateful task of philosophiz- 
ing. Yet, with all its variety, the better we know 
the Dialogue the more strongly we feel its or- 
ganic unity ; and, indeed, the thesis that never for 
a moment is lost from sight through all the diva- 
gations of reason and fancy, ought to be clear 
enough to any attentive student. It is pro- 
claimed by the author categorically more than 
once, notably in the beginning of the eighth book, 
at one of the cardinal points of the argument, 
where he says his design was to set forth the 

54. 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 65 

various forms of government, with the corre- 
sponding characters of individual men, "in order s44a 
that, having seen all these, and having come to an 
agreement about the best man and the worst, we 
might learn whether or not the best man is the 
most happy and the worst man the most miser- 
able." 

Words could not state more plainly than these 
that the object of the Dialogue is to come to an 
understanding about that affirmation of Socrates 
in the Gorgias concerning happiness and virtue, 
which was there upheld by the force of sarcasm 
and ridicule, but is now to be confirmed by argu- 
ment and by illustration of a positive sort. 

Here the problem arises as to the relation of 
the Platonic Dialogues to one another. The so- 
lution depends primarily on the time of composi- 
tion. If these works which we have considered as 
forming a propaedeutic to The Republic are com- 
paratively late in order, following at least the 
Phaedrus, which an ancient tradition held to be 
the earliest of all the Dialogues, then Plato, of 
course, was merely playing a part in them. If, 
however, they are, as virtually all scholars hold 
today, the unriper products of his genius, then 
we have still to answer the question whether they 
display the candid gropings of a mind attempt- 
ing to pass beyond the Socratic Quest, or were 
written purposely as a preparation, with the con- 
clusions of The Republic already in view. The 



56 PLATONISM 

decision can rest only on subtle inference and on 
comparison with the procedure of other writers. 
My own opinion is that the Charmides (with its 
companion pieces) and the Protagoras, Gorgias, 
and Republic certainly follow one another in this 
chronological order. But I cannot believe that 
they were all planned together deliberately as 
one complete design; for that would be to grant 
to their author a comprehensiveness of intellect 
and a power of artistic restraint almost more 
than human. Nor can I admit that they are to 
be taken as purely occasional treatises with no 
continuous argument ; for that is simply to write 
oneself down as incapable of reading philosophy. 
The only other explanation is to see in them the 
inevitable development of Plato's thought, and 
to suppose that in each case the larger theme of 
the Dialogue to succeed was floating vaguely be- 
fore him, but was not yet worked out in logical 
form. And this, too, is the most interesting 
theory ; for I doubt if literature affords any other 
example of a mind circling outwards from a 
single central impulse with quite such fateful 
regularity of pattern — and when we have fol- 
lowed these broadening rings to the utmost reach 
of our vision, it is as if they still moved onwards 
and outwards to some far-off invisible shore. 

The first book of The Republic is frankly an 
introduction, in which Plato recapitulates the 
Quest so far as this had carried him hitherto. 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 57 

After a dramatic exposition of the mise en scene 
he leads Socrates and Polemarchus into a genial 
debate on the nature of justice, very much as 
temperance was discussed in the Charmides, and 
bravery and holiness and friendship in the other 
early Dialogues ; and with the same inconclusive 
result. No tenable definition of justice is 
reached, but the inference is subtly suggested 
that in some way justice is merely one form of 
an all-embracing virtue, and that this master vir- 
tue is somehow dependent on knowledge. 

At this point the amicable conversation is 
broken by the sophist Thrasymachus, as the 
gambolling of lambs might be interrupted by the 
advent of a wolf. As CalUcles, in the Gorgias, 
was a rougher duplicate of Gritias, in the Charmi- 
deSj so the present antagonist is still more turbu- 
lent — a veritable devil's advocate ; and to the end 
of this book we have what is substantially a sum- 
mary of the main dispute of the Gorgias. You 
two, exclaims Thrasymachus, are talking silly 
nonsense and indulging in a game of mutual flat- 
tery. When urged by Socrates to give his own 
definition of the virtue, he asserts insolently that 
justice is the interest of the stronger, and nothing 
more ; and then, shifting the words to their popu- 
lar sense and calling that injustice which in his 
view of life is really justice, he repeats the cyn- 
ical theory of the day, which we have already 
heard from Calhcles, and now in this latter age 



68 PLATONISM 

are hearing proclaimed as a novel doctrine by 
teachers of the Nietzschean type. My meaning, 
says Thrasymachus, will be clear if we take the 
extreme case of so-called injustice, and see how 
happy it renders a man in contrast with the mis- 
erable creatures who are subject to him and obey 
the slave-morality — ^the injustice of the tyrant 
who brings a whole city imder his will and is able 
to provide for himself and his friends whatever 
good he desires. The truth of what I say, adds 
Thrasymachus, is proved by the fact that in their 
heart of hearts men envy and eulogize such a 
character; for in reality people give hard names 
to injustice not because they condemn the thing 
itself but because they are afraid of suffering un- 
der it. To this unreserved glorification of power 
Socrates has no difficulty in replying. The man 
who holds it right to make his own supremacy the 
law of conduct must first understand what his 
interest is, even in this crude form, so that mere 
strength is not sufficient but must be united with 
some sort of wisdom ; and as soon as this element 
of wisdom is admitted, all kinds of considerations 
of man's higher nature force themselves upon us 
and make the identification of happiness with 
sheer power unthinkable. 

The conclusion of the dispute is like that to 
which Socrates and Callicles came in the Gorgias, 
only with this important difference: in the pres- 
ent case Socrates admits that nothing has been 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 59 

finally decided. "The discussion," he says, at the 
end of the book, "has brought me no real know- 
ledge; for while I do not know what justice in 
itself is, we shall scarcely know whether it hap- 
pens to be a virtue or not, and whether he who 
possesses it is happy or not happy." And now, 
instead of cloaking this ignorance in the myth of 
a judgment to come, he will settle down with his 
friends to lay bare, if possible, the inmost nature 
of this thing they call justice, and to discover the 
source of their, or rather his, assurance that it is 
better to be just than unjust, better even, if needs 
be, to suffer the extremity of injustice than to do 
injustice. To this end they will strip justice of 
all the honours and rewards by which a man is 
lured to act contrary to his natural desires, and 
will contrast with this the purest injustice, with- 
out any of the penalties imposed upon it from 
without. They will picture to themselves a man 
who pursues through hfe an undeviating course 
of justice, yet who shall appear to others to be 
acting unjustly; and by his side they will set up 
the man who, hke the owner of the ring of in- 
visibihty, is able to satisfy all his evil propensi- 
ties without detection. Furthermore, for the sake 
of argument, they will suppose that the juggling 
pardon-sellers actually have the power to buy off 
the vengeance of the gods, so that by the sacrifice 
of a little of his ill-gotten gains the unjust man 
can be assured of as fair a prospect after death 



60 PLATONISM 

as the just man. Then they may see whether, 
imder such conditions as these, the just man is 
still happy and the imjust man unhappy. If this 
proves to be the case, it must be because justice 
in itself brings happiness and injustice misery. 
The novelty of such a procedure they fully rec- 
ognize, for, as one of them observes, from the be- 
ginning of the world, so far as the records go, 
there never has been an attempt to denounce in- 
justice and praise justice as they are in the soul, 
themselves the greatest possible evil and the 
greatest possible good, even if they are hidden 
from the eyes of men and gods. 

How shall this mystery be laid bare, and who 
shall read the writing on the secret scroll of the 
human heart? For a while the little band of 
searchers is daimted by the task; and then So- 
crates thinks of a device. After all, the State is 
but man writ large ; if, then, we are balked in dis- 
covering what we seek in the isolated soul, per- 
haps its operation will be traced more easily in 
the conduct of society. And so, for the rest of the 
Dialogue, the working of justice and injustice is 
regarded alternately as displayed in the individ- 
ual and in the Repubhc. 

To begin with the larger writing, Socrates 
suggests that the easiest way to track down the 
virtues of a city or State (the words were about 
synonymous to a Greek) will be to follow its 
progress genetically from its feeblest beginnings 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 61 

to its consummation as seen in a highly developed 
civiHzation. A Mttle examination shows that this 
advance is by what we should call today the in- 
creasing division of labour, or by what was sug- 
gested in the Charmides as the source of the vir- 
tue named temperance, that is by the practice of 
each man doing his own business. Such a law 
must not be limited to the individual, holding the 
shoemaker to his last and the farmer to his 
plough, but must permeate the organization of 
society; it will divide the people as a whole into 
separate classes, each with its special function in 
the conmion life. Three great tasks the State 
has : to govern itself, to defend itself, and to nour- 
ish itself; and to these vital functions will cor- 
respond the main division of the people into rul- 
ers and soldiers and producers. Then, if our 
principle of organization is sound, the State will 
possess the various virtues according as each of 
these classes carries out its proper activity : it will 
be wise when the rulers perform their duty com- 
petently, brave when the soldiers defend their 
fellow citizens under the guidance of the rulers, 
temperate when the labourers, obeying the rulers 
and protected by the soldiers, are industrious and 
productive.^ But we have not yet found the 

^ There is some confusion in Plato's conception of tem- 
perance as given in The Republic. Thus, at 4S2A, it is re- 
garded, not as the special virtue of the productive class, but 
as extended through all three classes. On the other hand, 



62 PLATONISM 

fourth of the cardinal virtues, the most important 
of all, justice. As there is no separate class left 
this virtue must somehow be spread through the 
whole of society. What else can it be but that 
very law itself of doing one's own business, which 
is the efficient cause of organization and the force 
behind the specific virtues? 

Now if the virtues of the single man are analo- 
gous to those of the State, it must be because the 
soul itself has faculties corresponding in their 
functions with the three classes of society. Two 
such faculties, or modes of the soul's activity, are 
manifest at a glance; reason, answering to the 
ruling class, and desire, answering to the pro- 
ductive, acquisitive class. And the specific vir- 
tues of these faculties name themselves : a man is 
wise when reason governs his actions, temperate 
when his appetites are imder subjection to rea- 
son. A third analogy Socrates finds in the fac- 
ulty by which we feel anger, indignation, resent- 
ment, pride, superiority — the thymos^ as it is 
called in Greek by an untranslatable term. This, 

such passages as 434c and 435b would seem to be mean- 
ingless unless temperance is limited to the productive class. 
Only by this restriction of temperance to the lowest ele- 
ment of the State and of the soul can it be separated from 
justice. So, certainly, Aristotle, with apparent reference to 
Plato, understood the matter (e.g., Topica v, 6, 10). The 
confusion in Plato is owing to his occasional failure to dis- 
tinguish between the division of the State into classes and 
of the soul into faculties. 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 63 

it should be observed, was not what we mean or 
think we understand by the "will"; for the will, 
if Plato had had any word of precisely this sig- 
nification, would not have been accepted by him 
as a separate faculty or mode of activity. He 
would have agreed wdth Hobbes in regarding it 
as "the last appetite in dehberating," and would 
have admitted the conclusive statement of Jona- 
than Edwards, to the effect that "a man never, 
in any instance, wills anything contrary to his 
desires, or desires anything contrary to his will, 
. . . the will is always determined by the strong- 
est motive." The thymos, then, is the seat of the 
personal emotions as distinguished from physical 
desires. It is at once, as an appetitive faculty, 
akin to the desires, and by its mental character- 
istics close to the reason ; it Ues between the two, 
hke the soldier class between the governors and 
the producers, and its virtue like theirs is bravery, 
or courage.^ 

^ The psychology of Plato for its purpose is sound and 
effective, and he was within his rights as a moralist when 
he threw it into relief by the great metaphor of the State. 
But the reader of The Republic should be warned that 
Plato's mental procedure was the reverse of his rhetorical 
method, and that his psychology really preceded his so- 
ciology. The division of the State into classes was made 
not so much for itself as for an illustration of the activities 
of the soul. As such it was an excellent device of rhetoric, 
even of logic ; but Plato, it must be acknowledged, sometimes 
overstepped the proper limits of analogy. He did not 
always remember that the State is a collection of funda- 



64 PLATONISM 

And so, as Socrates says, our dream is com- 
pleted, and by a fable, for which we may thank 
the gods, we have been guided to the discovery of 
justice in the soul. For evidently that principle 
of attending to one's business which was the or- 
ganizing force of society and the efficient cause 
of the civic virtues is a shadowy image of what 
443c we are seeking. In very truth the justice of a 
man is like that of the State, save for this im- 
portant difference, that it is not concerned with 
the division of labour in outer things, but with the 
conduct and being of the soul itself. It is the 
power that holds the several elements of the soul 
each to the performance of its peculiar duty, 
and forbids meddling. By it a man first brings 
order into his own nature, becoming one with 
himself, and having his members tempered and 
harmonized like the chords of a lute that make 
one music of many notes. And then, when the 

mental units, and not, like the soul, a unit with various 
forms of activity. There are in the State rulers and pro- 
ducers, and the distinguishing virtue of the former is wis- 
dom, as temperance is of the latter; but these classes are 
composed of individuals each of whom possesses all the 
faculties. The neglect of this simple fact has led our "di- 
vine" philosopher now and then, as it has led modern socio- 
logists, into strange and devious imaginings. His most ar- 
dent admirers will confess that, whereas he generally shows 
a profound intimacy with the intricacies of the individual 
soul, some of his theories of the State have a remote rela- 
tion to the realities of human nature. But this is one of the 
subjects which must be left for another time and another 
book. 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 65 ] 

peace of his inner life is established and he is | 

master of himself, he will proceed to act, as he ] 

has occasion to act, whether in a matter of private -i 

business or pubhc interest, in accordance with the ; 

law of justice within him, calling any act just 
which preserves the balance of his soul and co- ^ 

operates with it, and declining as unjust anything i 

that would contravene and mar his self-control. : 

Justice, in a word, might by its very definition 
be taken to denote the happier condition of the 
soul in precisely the same way as health of body is ] 

more desirable than disease. But a definition 
does not necessarily force conviction, and all that ^ 

logic can do — though its importance in this re- \ 

spect must not be underestimated — is to clear 
away from before our eyes the obstacles thrown 
up by false reasoning, and then to bid us look at 
the truth as it stands naked and revealed. In the \ 

end the success of any moral appeal depends on 
the consent of the soul itself; for of what avail, 
as Socrates asked, are argument and definition oorgias 472b 
unless the hearer in his very heart bears testimony ; 

to them? And there's the rub. Our life is woven \ 

of endlessly changing emotions, and few of us ' 

are capable of distinguishing the permanent from 
the transient effects of our acts, and of disentan- 
ghng the threads of experience so as to say that \ 

we feel thus now because we then did so. To ; 

draw proper conclusions we need the help of one j 

who is able to throw such a light into the soul and 



66 PLATONISM 

character of a man as shall make us see clearly 
into those dark places. The philosopher, there- 
fore, who is concerned with something besides 
verbal triumphs has no other recourse than to 
turn to the power of the imagination; and so 
Plato will devote the eighth and ninth books of 
his Dialogue to unfolding such a "counterfeit 
presentment" of the various forms of government 
and of the corresponding characters as shall 
compel the most reluctant reader to say: This is 
the very truth of things as I myself have seen 
it— 

"O Hamlet, speak no more; 
Thou tum'st mine eyes into my very soul." 

The method of portraiture will be a union of 
history and psychology. It will undertake to ex- 
hibit the cities of Greece actually passing from 
one form of government to another — from aris- 
tocracy to timocracy, and from that to oligarchy 
and democracy, and last to that tyranny which 
was the perpetual menace of these small and fac- 
tious States, and which was to close with the 
despotism of Alexander and the more enduring 
domination of Rome. And at the same time it 
will set forth the traits of human nature which 
lie behind these political changes as their cause 
Republic 544D aud material ; "for States are not things of stock 
or stone, but depend on the character of the men 
in them, which drags all else with it whatever 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 67 

way it inclines." Plato, writing when the forces 
of his people were at ebb, gave only the descend- 
ing scale of governments, so that his picture to 
be complete would need to be balanced by a cor- 
responding study of the ascending scale. It may 
be objected also that events in this world are not 
so regular in their progress as he has made them 
appear; yet it is none the less true that his gen- 
eralizations from the short and confused annals 
of Greece are in the main quite amazingly con- 
firmed by the larger sweep of history, and it is 
still more sadly true that a reflecting man can 
scarcely turn from Plato's account of the weak- 
nesses inherent in the nature of democracy with- 
out a shudder of apprehension. To take from 
Plato's broadly composed narrative a few sen- 
tences indicating the cardinal points of what 
might be entitled the Tyrant's Progress must 
necessarily deprive the picture of its symmetrj^ 
and its power of persuasion, but that is one of 
the disabilities we have to face in our attempt to 
dissect what is a living body of thought and no 
dead logic. The Dialogue itself remains un- 
touched for those who will read it. Now the just 
man in Plato's scheme is the aristocrat, he who 
has his centre of action in the reason, which is the 
best part of the soul. Such a man may find him- 
self in a society governed by quite other ideals 
than his own, a city where contention is rife and 
the ambition to prevail over others is stronger 



68 PLATONISM 

than the determination to rule over oneself. He 
will indeed live at peace with his own soul, content 
to serve the State as best he can for the unseen 
rewards of justice. But the son, unless by some 
divine chance he inherit his father's strength of 
character, will probably be moved by different 
considerations. The mother, perhaps, will feel 
herself humiliated because her husband is not dis- 
tinguished among the magistrates of the city, but 
lives in quiet contempt of the brawling courts 
and contentious assemblies, with, it may be, the 
appearance of indifference to her own feuds and 
vanities. She will inveigh against this philo- 
sophical life to her son, and the friends and very 
servants of the house will join in the complaints, 
and will urge the boy to go down into the battle 
and contend with the world's weapons for the 
prizes that his talents merit. To these exhorta- 
tions will be added the force of many examples 
and the voices of the market place, all telling him 
that those who mind their own business and fol- 
low too fine a sense of honour, after the manner 
of his father, are no better than simpletons — 

"Honour! tut, a breath: 
There's no such thing in nature ; a mere term 
Invented to awe fools." 

Thus the education of the world lays hold of him, 
and he loses his best guardian, that divine gift of 
philosophy tempered with the love of pure beauty 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 69 

which alone dweUing in the soul is able to pre- 
serve it to the uttermost. He becomes a timocrat 
instead of an aristocrat, a man in whom the glory 
of success and the name of authority override the 
simple law of justice and of intrinsic honour. He 
is no longer ruled by reason, but by undue pre- 
dominance of the sort of pride that belongs to the 
thymos, or spirited faculty. 

To understand the next step it is first neces- 
sary to note that by oligarchy Plato meant what 
we are more likely to name plutocracy, that is to 
say, "a government resting on the valuation of ssoc 
property, in which all real power is in the hands 
of the rich." The individual character corre- 
sponding to this kind of State will arise when the 
son of a timocrat sees his father suddenly mis- 
carry in some magnanimous project, striking 
against the prejudices of the city as a ship foun- 
ders on a sunken reef, and losing both reputation 
and authority, perhaps even life. Then the son, 
observing the insecurity of such a pubUc career, 
will turn his attention to the more tangible ad- 
vantages of money, and will devote his energies 
to the amassing of wealth. He will eject reason 
and pride from their high places, and on the va- 
cant throne of his soul will seat the concupiscent 
and covetous element, to which he will pay hom- 
age as if it were the Great King himself. In the 
ordinary transactions of business he will play the 
game so as, perhaps, to acquire the reputation of 



70 PLATONISM 

honest dealing — that, indeed, is within the scope 
of his ambition — but observe him when he has got 
hold of some trust for which he thinks he shall 
not be made to account, and you will see the 
rapacity of his nature. He may appear in the 
eyes of the world a very respectable sort of per- 
son, but there is no real health in him, nothing of 
the power and peace of a soul at one with itself. 
At the best his is but a sordid life, absorbed in the 
calculation of profit and loss, in which there is lit- 
tle room for the education of taste or for the 
pursuit of pleasure in its higher forms. The 
very absence of finer interests will permit the 
grovelling and sensual desires to gather strength 
within him, and these will be kept down only by 
the one masterful desire of increasing riches. He 
will be at war with himself, although the prudent 
element in him will still be in the ascendant. 

From such a state the transition to the lower 
stage of democracy is clear and rapid. Suppose 
the son of one of these money-getters comes into 
the early possession of wealth without the disci- 
pline of acquisition: almost certainly he will be 
imsettled by vain conceits and puflfed up by the 
flatteries of those who wish to prey upon him. 
He will be taught to regard modesty as merely 
simple; to ridicule temperance as unmanly; to 
despise moderation and thrift as vulgar and il- 
liberal. Such old-fashioned traits will be thrust 
rudely out of doors, and into their place will 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 71 

troop all those passions which his father had sup- 
pressed — insolence and anarchy and waste and 
shamelessness — rushing in now like revellers 
flushed with drink and crowned with garlands. 
All pleasures and desires are the same to him 
without distinction. He lives from day to day 
as his appetites impel him, indulging now in wine 
and lewd luxuries, then drinking water only and 
dieting; going in now for physical training, then 
throwing up everything for a spell of listless 
loafing; making a pretence even of the philo- 
sophical Ufe, or throwing himself into some po- 
litical excitement, or trying his luck in some 
business venture — living always without law or 
plan or purpose, taking license for liberty and 
ceaseless distraction for the pursuit of happiness. 
He is not one man, but many, the fit double of 
the democratic city.^ 

Last of all comes the tyrannical man, by an 
easy change. In the soul of each of us there 
dwell desires that are innocent and desires that 
are harmful; even in the good man the evil pro- 
pensities are not extirpated, but only held in 
leash. This we can see in ourselves when, after 
some undue indulgence of appetite, we fall asleep 
and, in this relaxation of reason and habit, be- 

^ It is only fair to add that by democracy Plato meant the 
license of equalitarianism ; his aristocratic State was really 
a democracy governing itself by respect for what is best in 
human nature. 



72 PLATONISM 

come the sport of fantastic and lawless visions. 
Then sometimes, in om* dreams, the wild beast 
within us goes forth boldly to slake its lust, and 
there is no crime, no shameful act of incest or 
violence or unnatural passion, which it may not 
commit. Exactly like this is the condition of the 
tyrannical man. He has been brought up in a 
democratical family to a perfectly unrestrained 
life, which the flatterers about him dignify by 
the name of liberty. His father and true friends 
still retain some moderation and balance among 
the desires that draw the heart this way and that, 
but the baser sort who hang upon him discover 
the natural bent of his nature, and by humouring 
this raise it to be imdisputed lord of the household 
within him, as it were a huge and winged drone 
in the hive, maddening him with a kind of frenzy 
to which every lesser impulse is made subordinate. 
Then indeed License is crowned king, and sits as 
the disposer of his soul. What he desires, whe- 
ther his master-passion be for money or women 
or power, he will have, though it involve the sac- 
rifice of every other emotion or necessitate any 
crime against those nearest and dearest to him. 
He is not a himian being, but a ravenous beast, 
or resembles a true man only as a man may seem 
to act in those hours of turbid dreaming when 
the soul is swept along by visions of abominable 
lust. 

Such is the Tyrant's Progress as it is drawn in 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 73 

the eighth and ninth books of The RepubliCj 
frightful enough in this brief outline, almost over- 
whelming when read with all the realistic details 
painted in by the relentless hand of the artist. 
Question may arise as to the propriety of apply- 
ing the names "aristocracy," "democracy," and 
the rest to the different stages of the degenerating 
State, and indeed the whole subject of Plato's 
sociology, in the sense of those terms, must, as I 
have said, be considered by itself. But of the 
reality of these various conditions in the hfe of 
society or of the individual, by whatever political 
names we designate them, there can be no doubt 
at all. To take the two limits, with which we are 
the most concerned, as was Plato, we recognize 
immediately the man whose faculties are each, so 
to speak, attending to its own business — the man 
who is wise by the due exercise of reason, temper- 
ate by the proper control of his appetites, brave 
and self-respecting by the measured activity of 
the thymos; and who deals with the world as he 
deals with himself. And we know equally well 
the flimsy creature who is tossed about from one 
unstable passion to another, until he sinks to the 
still lower stage, when out of the conflict of un- 
guarded desires one master-passion arises, like 
the criminal tyrant in a lawless State, to enslave 
the man's soul and drive him furiously across the 
rights of others. 

Well, Plato may now ask, have I not made out 



74 PLATONISM 

the case for Socrates? No one can look at these 
contrasted portraits of the aristocrat and the ty- 
rant without granting their veracity, or without 
saying to himself: "Yes, if this be justice, then 
the just man is in his own nature happy, and, if 
this be injustice, then the unjust man is in his 
own nature miserable. These equations corre- 
spond with what I have suspected in the lives of 
other men, and with what is the certain experi- 
ence of my own life. It is no more possible to 
escape these conclusions than to deny that phy- 
sical health means a state of pleasurable existence 
and disease means pain." This is the last and 
supreme argumentum ad hominem: It is better 
to do justice simply and solely because you are 
happier so doing than otherwise.* 

Do we seem to have gone a long way round to 
reach at the last what was all the while near at 
hand? The conclusion is a commonplace, or to 
use a fitter term, it is the common sense of man- 
kind, defended by the weapons of a terrible irony, 
confirmed by the insight of the man who perhaps 
saw more clearly than any one before him or af- 
ter him into the obscure depths of the human 
heart, and made persuasive by the art of a mas- 
terly rhetorician. But there is this remarkable 
fact to observe about a true commonplace in the 

* Compare the last proposition of Spinoza's Ethics: Beati- 
tudo non est virtutis praemium, sed ipsa virtus; nee eadem 
gaudemus, quia libidines coercemus, sed contra quia eadem 
gaudemus^ ideo libidines coercere possumus. 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 75 

moral order : it passes current in the mouths of all 
unsophisticated men, yet if you question them 
about it you are hkely to discover that they can- 
not explain its meaning, and if you press them 
closely you may even bring them to deny that it 
has any meaning. As for the commonplace 
which forms the goal of the Platonic Quest, it 
not only has these features of other conmion- 
places of morality, but it stands at the bifurca- 
tion of the road where religion and philosophy 
part company. Religion, though hke philosophy 
it is really based on the Socratic affirmation, is 
yet too fearful to rest on this truth alone, and 
will seek another foundation for its faith in some 
miraculous event of history or in some revelation 
from above. So St. Paul argued to the Corinth- 
ians: 

"Now if Christ be preached that He rose from 
the dead, how say some among you that there is 
no resurrection of the dead?" 

"And if Christ be not risen, then is our preach- 
ing vain, and your faith is also vain." 

"If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we 
are of all men most miserable." ^ 

We are of all men most miserable — is not this 
the very reverse of what Plato thought philo- 
sophy was to teach when he set forth on his great 

^ I Cor, XV, 12, 14, 19. 



76 PLATONISM 

search in The Republic?^ I have not in mind to 
speak shghtingly of the Christian faith, or of any- 
genuine faith; I know the sources of reUgious 
conviction; but when I see the perplexity into 
which even St. Paul could be thrown by the 
fear of losing his belief in a particular miraculous 
event, I appreciate the force of Plato's boast that 
he alone, with his master, had the courage to rest 
his faith on the simple common sense of mankind. 
This is philosophy. Having expounded the 
meaning of the commonplace that it is better to 
be just than to be unjust, and having thus given 
authority to the affirmation of the spirit, philo- 
sophy does not seek for extraneous proofs of this 
truth, but proceeds to use it as a principle for 
investigating the manifold life and activities of 
the soul. 

In the Protagoras we reached the goal of the 
Socratic Quest, when it was shown that the 
knowledge identified with virtue was the know- 
ledge needed for the calculation of the conse- 

^ With St. Paul's religious fear of scepticism one may 
compare the great passage of the Apology (40c-41d) in 
which Socrates states his philosophic faith as confirmed by 
the daemonic guide and undaunted by doubt: "To die must 
be one of two things : either the dead are as nothing and have 
no perception or feeling whatsoever, or else, as many be- 
lieve, there is a change and migration of the soul from this 
world to another. . . . And ye too, my judges, ought to be 
of good hope towards death, being persuaded of this one 
truth at least, that no evil can befall a good man either in 
life or in death." 



THE PLATONIC QUEST 77 

quences of any act in the terms of pleasure and 
pain. It now appears that the Platonic Quest 
has also brought us to knowledge, but to know- 
ledge of a different order. To go back to our 
starting-point in the Charmides, it will be re- 
membered that Critias suggested a definition of 
temperance, there the typical virtue, as the do- 
ing of one's business. To this suggestion Socrates 
replied that the endeavour to do one's own busi- 
ness would profit a man little unless he first had 
some knowledge of what business was really his 
own. And Critias, accepting the challenge, de- 
clared that temperance, or any other virtue, did 
presuppose knowledge, and was, indeed, such 
knowledge as the God of Delphi impHed in the 
words "Know thyself," with which he greeted his 
worshippers in place of the ordinary salutation 
among men, "Rejoice." One feels, while reading 
the Charmides, that in Plato's eyes Critias had 
enounced a great truth, and that his subsequent 
entanglement by Socrates was owing to his in- 
abihty to defend dialectically a sound position in- 
to which he had, so to speak, stumbled blindly. 
And now, in the appeal of The Republic to the 
inner experience of the hearer, we learn at last 
what was meant by connecting morahty with the 
Delphic salutation. The knowledge commanded 
by the God is no empty "knowledge of know- 
ledge," as it became to Critias under the fire of 
Socrates' questions, but receives a very definite 



78 PLATONISM 

content. To know myself is to be effectively con- 
scious of this certain fact, that I am happy when 
I act morally, and, conversely, that I am acting 
morally so long as I am happy. 

This knowledge of happiness is not of things 
future, nor is it, like the knowledge of pleasure, 
dependent for its authority on a fallible science 
of calculation; it is immediate and independent. 
Here, evidently, are two different orders of know- 
ledge, on both of which our conduct is based, and 
Plato's philosophy has yet to explain the para- 
doxical bond between the knowledge which So- 
crates identified with virtue and the knowledge by 
which we confirm our spiritual affirmation. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SOCRATIC PARADOX: THE DUALISM OF 

PLATO 

The conclusions of The Republic, it will be 
seen at a glance, are reached by a thoroughgoing 
dualism. In particular the criterion of happi- 
ness, whereon, as I think, the whole ethical sys- 
tem of Plato finally rests, will have no clear 
meaning for us unless we see how it came to be 
used by him as something essentially different in 
kind from pleasure. 

In the Protagoras we heard Socrates arguing 
that, whatever else may be open to doubt, all 
pleasure in itself is certainly good and all pain 
evil. If on any occasion a man seems to reject 
a pleasure as evil, this is only because, if admitted, 
it would deprive him of a greater pleasure or re- 
sult in an overbalance of pain. Therefore virtue 
is a science of mensuration applied to pleasure 
and pain ; when we err in our conduct it is through 
lack of this kind of knowledge, and the common 
reproach that a man is overcome by pleasure is 
no condemnation of pleasure itself, but of the 
man who is in a state of ignorance regarding the 
most important matter of life. 

This is the so-called philosophy of hedonism, 

79 



80 PLATONISM 

or, if the phrase is not self-contradictory, indi- 
vidualistic utilitarianism. It probably, to judge 
from the way it was carried out in the Cyrenaic 
and Epicm^ean schools, represents a genuine as- 
pect of the Socratic attempt to identify virtue 
and knowledge. But Plato, as we have seen, 
soon passed beyond that position, if indeed he 
was ever really satisfied with it. In the Gorgias 
he introduces Socrates as forcing his opponents 
to admit a seemingly quahtative difference in 
pleasures, and in so doing he virtually takes the 
foundation from under hedonism as a self-suffi- 
cient scheme of ethics. For the moment you 
grant a choice among pleasures not determined 
by the scientific mensuration of more and less, 
but based upon a qualitative criterion of good 
and bad, you are far along on the path towards 
admitting a criterion which is outside of and 
above pleasures and depends upon a generic dis- 
tinction between all pleasure properly so-called 
and a feeling of another order. 

The ruthlessness with which Plato at first ap- 
plies this criterion would rather indicate that it 
was a new discovery with him and had not been 
in his mind when he wrote the Protagoras, Hav- 
ing perceived that pleasure, so far from affording 
the final measure of good, might even be contrary 
to the good, he seems for a while to have taken 
pleasure in denigrating pleasure. So, in the Gor- 
gias, he outruns the requirements of his argu- 



DUALISM OF PLATO 81 

ment in forcing attention upon the disgusting 
possibilities of a hedonistic standard. Again, in 
the PhaedOj he recurs more definitely to the 64d ff. 
theme of the Protagoras, and repudiates its con- 
clusions in the most vehement language. What are 
we to think, he asks, of those who, as the popular 
opinion holds, are brave because they are afraid 
to be cowards, casting out fear by fear, or of 
those who are temperate through calculation of 
future pains, masters of certain pleasures be- 
cause they are the slaves of other pleasures? No, 
this is not the real business of morality, to barter 
pleasures for pleasures and pains against pains, 
the greater and the less, as if they were pieces 
of money. But that is the only right currency 
when we exchange all these things for wisdom 
and courage and justice, all these pleasures and 
pains for true virtue. Do you believe for a 
moment that the philosopher has any serious 
concern for these baubles that we call pleas- 
ures? They are but the poor affections of the 
body, whereas all the study of the philosopher 
is to escape, so far as mortal man can escape, 
from the body and its obscure interests into 
the world of Ideas which are the veritable hfe 
of the soul. The very intensity of a pleasure 
may be a hindrance to the soul in her labour of 
purgation and her search for the truth, since 
those things that cause us to feel most strongly 
are apt to seem clearest to us and truest, and so 



82 PLATONISM 

the keenest emotions may be those that bind us 
most closely to this earth. Every pleasure and 
every pain is, as it were, a nail that clamps the 
soul to the body and makes her corporeal, creat- 
ing the opinion that those things are true which 
the body affirms, and preventing the soul from 
passing to the other world in her own purity and 
power. This is the tone, too, of the MenOy though 
less poetically coloured, and of parts of The Re- 
public, and appears to represent Plato's middle 
period of lyrical revolt. At times he almost ap- 
proaches the paradoxical enthusiasm of the first 
CjTiic, who used to avow that he would rather go 
mad than feel pleasure. 

But this unmitigated asceticism is a passing 
phase of Plato's philosophy and does not repre- 
sent his final judgment of human life. In his 
later years he was to settle back into a saner at- 
titude towards the common-sense view, and to 
recognize that pleasure was not in itself necessar- 
ily an evil, but mixed with good and bad, and, 
properly considered, one of the decisive guides 
of conduct. Much of the Philebus is given up to 
a dispassionate analysis of pleasure and an en- 
deavour to determine its relation to knowledge as 
the highest form of mortal activity. Still later, 
in the Laws, almost as if in a spirit of recantation 
for his earlier severity, he descends from his high 
philosophical scorn to discuss the quotidian uses 
of pleasure and pain as constituting the practical 



DUALISM OF PLATO 83 

problem of education. These first books of the 
Laws are so frequently disregarded by writers on 
Platonism that it will be worth while to dwell at 
some length on their expression of his ripest and 
mellowest views. 

In The Republic Plato had entered upon a dis- 
cussion of the sort of education suitable for a 
citizen of the world, but had been turned away 
from this topic by the allurements of pure philo- 
sophy. After writing this Dialogue he went 
through what may be called a metaphysical 
period, and then, in his closing years, as life be- 
gan to look less solemn to him, he seems to have 
felt doubts of the availability of his high morality 
for the common needs of mankind. And so the 
talk of the three friends, which forms the matter 
of his last work, will be "the temperate play of Laws 685a 
old men amusing themselves in regard to the 
laws." Instead of a debate on the uncompromis- 
ing ideals of the philosopher, this Dialogue will 
deal with the education of the ordinary citizen 
and the formation of a practical government. 

The heart of the whole argument is in this no- 
table passage of the first book: "We should con- 644d 
sider that each of us as a living creature is but a 
divine puppet, whether created as a plaything of 
the gods or in some more serious mood. Of this 
we are not certain, but we know that the feelings 
[of pleasure and pain] are the sinews, or cords, 
that pull us in various directions." Hence the 



84 PLATONISM 

lawgiver who has to study the well-being of so- 
ciety cannot afford to neglect these motives of 
action; rather, his first object will be to get them 
into his own hands so as to be able to form and 
control the character of his citizens : 

653a *'I say, therefore, that pleasure and pain are the 
original perception of children, and these are the 
things in which virtue and vice first come to the 
soul. As for wisdom and settled convictions of 
truth, fortunate is he to whom they come even in 
his old age, and he is the perfect man who pos- 
sesses them with all their blessings. Now the 
virtue first appearing in children I call their edu- 
cation. If pleasure and hking, pain and hatred, 
are rightly implanted in the souls of those who 
have not yet learned to know them by reason, and 
if, when reason is added, their souls are in accord 
with it as to the fact that they have been rightly 
trained by suitable habits, this harmony is virtue 
in its completeness ; but the part of virtue that has 
to do with the right training in pleasures and 
pains, teaching us to hate what we ought to hate 
from the beginning of life to the end, and to love 
what we ought to love, — if we separate this part 
in our discourse and call it education, we shall in 
my opinion be using the right name." ^ 

The point to remember, then, is that to Plato's 
sober thought pleasure was not in itself a thing 

^ I am not at all sure that my translation of this difficult 
passage is correct in every detail, but the general sense of 
the Greek is plain enough. 



DUALISM OF PLATO 85 

undesirable, nor yet in any way negligible (such 
a belief would have been simply inhuman), but 
was rather the most important matter to be con- 
sidered in education from the earhest years of 
childhood. The health of the soul was involved, 
he thought, in the acquisition of right habits of 
feeling. At the same time it is clear that this 
healthy but unreasoning state of virtue ulti- 
mately was dependent upon something besides 
the mere difference between pleasure and pain; 
and, in fact, all through the first books of the 
Laws the education of youth is placed in the 
hands of men who have attained "wisdom and 
settled convictions of truth," and who are able to 
mould the habits of their pupils by the authority 
of "virtue in its completeness." The wisdom of 
these guides is the knowledge, as expressed in the 
conclusion of The Republic, that as we act mo- 
rally we are happy; their authority is in the fact 
that this feeling of happiness is of itself and al- 
ways good, whereas pleasure is a subordinate 
feeling, to be controlled finally by a power out- 
side of itself. In other words, Plato in the Laws 
has reverted from his temporary rejection of 
pleasure as intrinsically a snare of evil, but still 
adheres to his belief in the radical difference be- 
tween pleasure and happiness, pain and misery.^ 

^ I am fully aware of the ambiguity of "happiness" as a 
translation of Plato's evSaifiovta, but no better term seems to 
be available. "Eudaemony" is not English. The words 



86 PLATONISM 

This most fundamental distinction of Plato's 
dualism is alluded to many times in the Dia- 
470b logues, notably, and apparently first, in the Gorg- 
iaSj where Socrates, to the amazement of his 
hearers, will not admit that the Great King, to 
whom every possible pleasure is open in the high- 
est degree, is happy unless he is also just and 
righteous. In The Republic the same theme is 
taken up and elaborated in the strongest conceiv- 
able terms. For the sake of avoiding any mis- 
understanding two extreme types are isolated 
and contrasted one with the other. The unjust 
man is to possess all the pleasures and so-called 
good things of the world, with unrestricted power 
to carry out his desires and with no prospect of 
coming pain to mar his enjoyment. Even be- 
yond that, he is to have also the reputation of 
justice, so that the finer pleasures of honour shall 
fall to him as well as the grosser material plea- 
sures. With his wealth he can even, as people 
suppose, make himself acceptable to the gods by 
the magnificence of his sacrifices. On the other 
side is set the just man, in his noble simplicity, 

"felicity" and "blessedness" suggest themselves, but are 
barred out by their association with a future life. I must 
beg the reader to divest the word "happiness" of the sense 
customarily given it in philosophy as meaning no more than 
a sum of pleasures, and to accept my use of it as signifying 
a feeling different in kind from pleasure. As a matter of 
fact this deeper meaning is often unconsciously, or half- 
consciously, conveyed by the word in ordinary speech. 



DUALISM OF PLATO 87 

the man who, as Aeschylus says, wishes to be and 
not to seem good. He is to possess his justice 
alone, without even the reputation of it, but, be- 
ing the best of men, is to be reputed the worst. 
Let him be scourged and abused and cruelly tor- 
tured ; let him know all the pains of existence and 
none of the pleasures, with no hope of compensa- 
tion hereafter. Would Socrates dare to affirm 
that under such conditions the just man is still 
the happier and the imjust man the more miser- 
able? And Socrates does not waver. 

Nor does Plato waver. In the matter of lan- 
guage he may now and then fall into apparent 
ambiguities; for it must be remembered always 
that he had no technical terminology at his com- 
mand, and employed words pretty much as they 
came to him. We should not therefore be sur- 
prised if at times, when the philosophical distinc- 
tion is not the matter uppermost in his mind, he 
fails to discriminate sharply between the words 
pleasure (Jiedone) and happiness (eudaimonia) , 
or even seems to take the latter consciously, in 
what was then, as now, its popular use, to mean 
merely pleasure in its larger and more stable as- 
pect. There is, for instance, a curious passage of 
the Laws in which he begins by making the dis- 660e a. 
tinction clearly, as he had done in the Gorgias 
and The Republic, and then draws back from his 
position as if alarmed by its possible conse- 
quences. If, he says, the just life is not repre- 



88 PLATONISM 

sented as offering also the greater sum of plea- 
sure, and we force upon men the uncompromis- 
ing question whether he is the happier who lives 
the justest life or he who lives the most pleasur- 
able, why, they will retort upon us by asking 
what is the profit to your just man from his ex- 
istence devoid of pleasure. Somehow, therefore, 
the lawgiver must refrain from separating the 
pleasurable and the just. He will say that we 
see these things but dimly, and so they appear 
differently to different men, just things appear- 
ing pleasant to the just man and unjust things 
unpleasant, but contrariwise to the unjust man. 
Now the judgment of the just man we must sup- 
pose to be more valid than that of the unjust man, 
and our task will be to make his judgment pre- 
vail as a criterion of pleasures. Such a conclu- 
sion might seem to carry us back to the aban- 
doned position of the Protagoras; yet even here 
a phrase slips in which shows that Plato was 
merely arguing on a lower plane for practical 
purposes. This belief that the balance of plea- 
sure belongs to righteousness is perhaps only a 
663d salutary illusion, he says, which the cunning law- 
giver can implant in the minds of the young, sim- 
ilar to the myths of the gods with which religion 
is bound up in the popular creed. Plato, in other 
words, was here writing for practical men and 
making his appeal to the ordinary intelligence. 
He saw that for such minds it would be useless, 



DUALISM OF PLATO 89 

if not actually prejudicial, to present his thesis 
in the absolute terms of philosophy; just as the 
preacher today who is engaged in the cure of souls 
would probably succeed only in rendering relig- 
ion fantastic or repugnant to sober people of the 
world by describing the agonies of a martyr at 
the stake and trying to make his audience reaHze 
that it is possible amid such torture to die in an 
ecstasy of happiness. Such a preacher would be 
proclaiming a psychological fact, but it is doubt- 
ful whether his words would be for edification. 

So, I take it, there is a certain philosophical 
"economy" here and there in the language of the 
Laws; possibly, too, Plato's own naked convic- 
tion seemed to him in his later years, not less true, 
but less urgent for the common need of mankind. 
However that be, one thing is indubitable: he 
who has not grasped this distinction in kind be- 
tween happiness and pleasure will wander in the 
labyrinth of Plato's Dialogues with no clue to 
guide him. He may admire their various beauties 
and their infinite riches, but they will be to him 
a maze without ultimate plan or exit. 

This dualism of feeling, as I have said before 
and must say again, is the great discovery of 
Plato; its vital importance is proved by the 
course of philosophy among writers of the mod- 
em world who have forgotten it or tried in one 
way and another to avoid it. Certainly the his- 
tory of ethical theory ought to estabHsh one fact 



90 PLATONISM 

incontestably : no doctrine can speak with the per- 
emptory voice of truth which eschews all forms 
of reward and penalty. No statement of a cate- 
gorical imperative, no trust in an innate sense of 
duty, no exhortation to the love of God or of 
man, will avail against the temptations of the 
world unless the admonition bears with it the 
promise of satisfying what all men instinctively 
crave. The heart of man naturally demands 
pleasure or happiness, and will not forgo its de- 
mand.^ 

On the other hand those who have understood 
this trait of human nature, without admitting, 
tacitly it may be, the radical dualism of pleasure 
and happiness, have fallen invariably into one of 
two difficulties: either they have sunk into a de- 
grading form of Epicureanism, or, shunning this 
error, they have lost themselves in the pursuit of 
elusive shadows. These difficulties are abund- 
antly evident in the development of English 
utilitarianism. The strength of Bentham's sys- 
tem — and it had undoubted strength — lay in his 
steady perception of the relation between the 
practice and the reward of virtue. But his purely 
quantitative standard of pleasures left out of the 
account too large a part of human nature to sat- 
isfy the finer minds even among his followers. 

^ Those who think that happiness is omitted from the 
Buddhist scheme of salvation have strangely misread the 
books or, more probably, have not read them at all. 



DUALISM OF PLATO 91 

So we see John Stuart Mill endeavouring to 
abide by the half-truth of utilitarianism while 
giving to it a colour and a tone which should raise 
it out of the sty. "When thus attacked," he says, 
"the Epicureans have always answered, that it 
is not they, but their accusers, who represent 
human nature in a degrading light ; since the ac- 
cusation supposes human beings to be capable of 
no pleasures except those of which swine are 
capable. ... It must be admitted, however, that 
utilitarian writers in general have placed the su- 
periority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly 
in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, 
&c., of the former — that is, in their circumstantial 
advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. 
And on all these points utilitarians have fully 
proved their case ; but they might have taken the 
other, and, as it may be called, higher ground, 
with entire consistency. It is quite compatible 
with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, 
that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable 
and more valuable than others. It would be ab- 
surd that while, in estimating all other things, 
quality is considered as well as quantity, the esti- 
mation of pleasures should be supposed to depend 
on quantity alone." ^ 

Bentham had recognized no difference at all 
between pleasure and happiness. Mill, by his 
addition of a qualitative standard, was really 

* Utilitarianism, Chap. ii. 



92 PLATONISM 

feeling his way towards a standard of morality 
above pleasure, while still verbally denying the 
existence of such a standard.^ He is the example 

^ Surely there is no consistency, but inconsistency, in the 
two members of Mill's sentence : "On all these points utili- 
tarians have fully proved their case; but they might have 
taken the other, and, as it might be called, higher ground, 
with entire consistency." If the utilitarians are right in 
making "permanency, safety," etc. the standard of value 
and desirability among pleasures, what is the need or mean- 
ing of another, qualitative standard.^ — I admit freely that 
this question of a qualitative and quantitative standard of 
pleasures is extremely subtle, and for its complete answer, 
in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, should be de- 
ferred until after the consideration of Plato's psychology 
and cosmology. A qualitative standard would seem to rest 
on the difference between the sensation of pleasure in the 
fulfilment of physical desires (the IttiOvixyitlkov') and the 
emotion of pleasure in the satisfaction of personal desires 
(the 6v/i6<;)f between, that is, such a sensation as that which 
accompanies the quenching of thirst and such an emotion 
as that which accompanies the satisfaction of pride or 
vanity. But the consistent utilitarian would maintain that 
the difference here is still really quantitative, and so com- 
mensurable, being measured by permanency, etc., as well as 
by intensity ; and he would argue that the personal emotions 
are more considerable than the physical sensations by a true 
quantitative standard. I am inclined to think that the utili- 
tarian has proved, or could prove, his case. If this double 
quantitative standard of intensity and of permanency is re- 
ferred to the cosmological dualism of the one and the many, 
the immutable and the flux, it will be seen that pleasure, 
as a momentarily shifting sensation, tends to commingle 
itself with pain, and, as an unchecked distraction moving 
in the direction of the flux, must be so far adjudged evil. It 
becomes good on the contrary only in so far as it subserves 
the more stable part of our personal self. Meanwhile there 



DUALISM OF PLATO 93 

par excellence of a philosopher who combines the 
most lucid powers of exposition with an incapa- 
city of clear thinking. The entanglement of Mill 
and the later utihtarians was patent to T. H. 
Green, who sought a way of escape by saving de- 
sire as a motive of action while changing the ob- 
ject of desire. To this end he sets up a distinc- 
tion between pleasure and what he calls "self- 
satisfaction," and argues that the object of our 
desire is not pleasure or even the pleasure of self- 
satisfaction, but is this self-satisfaction for its own 
sake, while pleasure, if it comes, is a mere contin- 
gent effect. By this analysis of the object of de- 
sire he thinks he has pointed to the source of Mill's 
confusion and has estabhshed a criterion of val- 
ues superior to pleasure. Now many of Green's 
pages devoted to the elucidation and expansion 
of his idea of self-satisfaction are rich with the 
burden of history, and there is a hearty kernel of 
truth in his argument. But there are two fatal 
weaknesses. In the first place Green's notion that 
5^Z/-satisf action may consist in the sacrifice of the 
individual's well-being for the well-being of so- 
ciety is only Bentham's old fallacy, decked out 
in new terms, of supposing that we can appeal to 
pleasure as the motive of conduct and then avoid 

can be no harm, I think, in speaking of the admission of 
a seemingly qualitative difference in pleasures as a step 
towards recognizing the fundamental distinction between 
pleasure and happiness. 



94 PLATONISM 

the egotistic consequences of such a creed by 
merging pleasure in the greatest happiness (as 
the utihtarians use the word) of the greatest 
number. And, secondly, Green is blind to the 
fact that, by rejecting pleasure as his motive yet 
failing to find the criterion of self-satisfaction in 
happiness as a feeling distinct in kind from 
pleasure, he leaves his standard of self-satisfac- 
tion — so long as he writes consistently — without 
verifiable meaning or content. Take one of his 
typical sections: 

. . . "To the question. What is the well-being 
which in a calm hour we desire but a succession 
of pleasures? we reply as follows. The ground 
of this desire is a demand for an abiding satisfac- 
tion of an abiding self. In a succession of plea- 
sures there can be no such satisfaction, nor in the 
longest prolongation of the succession any nearer 
approach to it than in the first pleasure enjoyed. 
If a man, therefore, under the influence of the 
spiritual demand described, were to seek any suc- 
cession of pleasures as that which would satisfy 
the demand, he would be under a delusion. Such 
a delusion may be possible, but we are not to sup- 
pose that it takes place because many persons, 
through a mistaken analysis of their inner ex- 
perience, affirm that they have no idea of well- 
being but as a succession of pleasures."^ 

How often, while reading such passages as 

® Prolegomena § 234. 



DUALISM OF PLATO 95 

these, we feel that Green is on the verge of mak- 
ing the great discovery made by Plato so long 
ago, but is held back by the age-old fallacy of 
regarding happiness, or whatever you choose to 
call it, as nothing more than a succession or con- 
summation of pleasures! What vain circumlo- 
cutions his noble spirit would have been spared, 
and what hair-sphtting subtleties of argument, 
if he had been able to say in simple, straightfor- 
ward language, "This self-satisfaction or well- 
being which I am trying so hard to offer as a 
substitute for the unsatisfaction of pleasure is 
just the happiness that every man has felt and 
may understand"!^ 

No, mankind craves happiness; it can be 
weaned from the seduction of false pleasures only 
by this possession which is so like pleasure yet 
greater and essentially other than pleasure, and 
it will be diverted by no empty promises or 
threats. The whole religious hterature of the 
world, truer in its candid reliance on the intui- 
tive knowledge of the soul than are the rebeUious 
searchings of the schools, is replete with appeals 
to our consciousness of the difference between 
pleasure and the rapture, or peace, or happiness 
— the word is nought but the fact is everything — 

^ The distinction between pleasure and happiness is im- 
plicit in such passages of the Prolegomena as §§ 228^ 238; 
but it is never defined or brought out into the light^ and for 
the most part Green accepts happiness in the utilitarian 
sense as the sum of pleasures. 



96 PLATONISM 

of obedience to a higher law than our personal 
or physical desires. I could cover many pages 
with passages to this effect; a single quotation 
from one of the older of our English divines, the 
length of which may be excused by the impor- 
tance of the topic, will suffice : 

"That joy should be enjoined, that sadness 
should be prohibited, may it not be a plausible 
exception against such a precept, that it is super- 
fluous and needless, seeing all the endeavours of 
men do aim at nothing else but to procure joy 
and eschew sorrow; seeing all men do conspire in 
opinion with Solomon, that a man hath nothing 
better under the sun than — to he merry, 

"It is true that men, after a confused manner, 
are very eager in the quest, and earnest in the 
pursuit of joy; they rove through all the forests 
of creatures, and beat every bush of nature for 
it, hoping to catch it either in natural endow- 
ments and improvements of soul, or in the gifts 
of fortune, or in the acquists of industry ; in tem- 
poral possessions, in sensual enjoyments, in ludi- 
crous divertisements and amusements of fancy; 
so each in his way doth incessantly prog for joy; 
but all much in vain, or without any considerable 
success ; finding at most, instead of it, some faint 
shadows, or transitory flashes of pleasure, the 
which, depending on causes very contingent and 
mutable, residing in a frail temper of fluid hu- 
mours of the body, consisting in slight touches 
upon the organs of sense, in frisks of the corpor- 



DUALISM OF PLATO 97 

eai spirits or in fumes and vapours twitching the 
imagination, do soon flag and expire. 

"Wherefore there is ground more than enough, 
that we should be put to seek for a true, substan- 
tial, and consistent joy. It is a scandalous mis- 
prision, vulgarly admitted, concerning religion, 
that it is altogether sullen and sour. Such, in- 
deed, is the transcendent goodness of our God, 
that he maketh our delight to be our duty, and 
our sorrow to be our sin, adapting his holy will 
to our principal instinct; that he would have us 
to resemble himself, as in all other perfections, 
so in a constant state of happiness. Indeed, to 
exercise piety and to rejoice are the same things, 
or things so interwoven that nothing can disjoin 
them."« 

It is the honour of Plato that he held fast to 
this fundamental truth of religion, while basing 
it on the immediate intuition of the mind, with- 
out necessary recourse to the problematical re- 
wards and penalties of another state of existence. 

This is the beginning of Plato's dualism, but 
not the end. If happiness and pleasure are dis- 
tinct feelings, it will follow that the activities they 
accompany, or the motives of our activity, are 
likewise distinguished in kind. We are brought 
back to that troublesome and recurring question 
of the early Dialogues as to the identity or sep- 
arateness of the virtues. Somehow it appeared 

^ From the forty-third sermon of Isaac Barrow^ with 
omissions. 



98 PLATONISM 

there, as we took up bravery and temperance and 
holiness in turn, that they all had a tendency to 
run together into one supreme virtue; yet, as 
soon as we reached this point, invariably the par- 
ticular virtue under discussion lost its concrete 
value, and we were left with an empty word on 
our hands which had no significance for solving 
the specific problems of life. Now, if we return 
to these unanswered puzzles after considering 
Plato's later Dialogues, we shall see that the dif- 
ficulty lay in the ambiguity of the word "virtue" 
{arete), which is used for two quite different 
things. For our own convenience, therefore, we 
will henceforth make a distinction in language 
which Plato himself never made, by using differ- 
ent translations for the same word to denote a 
distinction in fact which he did make. So far as 
possible we will reserve the word "virtue" for 
the art of living, for right conduct, that is, as 
manifested in specific spheres of activity, and 
will adopt the word "morality" for the higher 
unity in which the particular virtues seemed to 
have a way of losing themselves. 

It is not easy to decide how fully Plato him- 
self in his earlier Dialogues was aware of this dis- 
tinction which later becomes so important to his 
ethical system. In the Protagoras it is latent. 
We can see it growing clearer in the Phaedo and 
the Meno, though it is there still only implicit. 
In The Republic the distinction is something 



DUALISM OF PLATO 99 ' 

more than implied by the separate treatment of I 

the group of virtues — wisdom, bravery, temper- ! 
ance — on the one hand and of justice on the other. 
Wisdom is the right action of our reason, brav- 
ery of the thymos, and temperance of the desires. 

These are the specific virtues. Justice is the com- ■ 

pelling and governing force behind all these ■ 

forms of activity, the healthy balance of the soul j 

as a whole and its right energy as a unit. This \ 

distinction between morality as the central gov- j 

erning force and the virtues as specific forms of \ 

activity is brought out even more clearly in the j 
Politicus, where it is shown that the specific 306a s. j 
virtues, or perhaps we should say the tendencies 
that create them, may come, if left to them- 
selves, into actual conflict one with another. 

Thus, for example, bravery and temperance \ 

are not only different one from the other, but ; 

may take hostile sides in the soul of a man \ 
or in a State. Bravery, in so far as it is the 

quality of a temperament quick and virile by j 

nature, is apt, if unrestrained, to run into im- j 

petuosity and insolence; whereas temperance, as j 

it is found in a disposition inclined to slowness | 

and quiet, may very easily sink into sloth and i 

cowardliness. These temperaments and virtues \ 

manifest themselves in two classes of men who | 

may divide a city into factious parties (Plato j 

would say today into radicals and conserva- ! 
tives), and whom it is the art of the true states- 



100 PLATONISM 

man to reconcile in friendly co-operation for the 
common good. Though Plato does not here draw 
the parallel out in so many words, it is every- 
where implied that this royal art {basilike 
techne) of the governing statesman is but an- 
other name for justice, equivalent to the moral 
principle that in the individual soul resides above 
the various activities, and governs and harmo- 
nizes the specific virtues. 

But for the final exposition of this, as of so 
many other doctrines, we must turn to the book 
Laws 963a ff of Plato's old agc. All our laws, he says at the 
conclusion of that long treatise, must be con- 
trolled by some one purpose. As the physician 
has a definite end in view, the preservation of 
health, to which all his activities are directed, and 
as the pilot has a definite task, so it must be with 
the statesman, or lawgiver. The aim of the 
statesman is the creation and preservation of vir- 
tue in the State ; and as his aim is thus not many, 
but one, so the virtues which have appeared to 
us all along as fourfold must also in some way be 
one virtue, or subordinate to some one moral pur- 
pose. It was easy to see what was meant by the 
special virtue of bravery ; it is a manner of facing 
things fearful. The nature of wisdom, too, is 
clear; it is a kind of prudence in the choice and 
use of means. And in the same way we imder- 
stand temperance and justice. But what is the 
character of the moral force in subservience to 



DUALISM OF PLATO 101 

which these various virtues are united? It is a 
kind of wisdom — ^not prudence, but the mind, or 
intelligence — ^working in him who is able not only 
to discern the many different activities of life but 
to look beyond them ; the divine vision of him who, 
whatever may be the field of observation, is able 
to behold the changeless law above all change. It 
is the knowledge, rehgiously speaking, of the 
gods, that they are and that they govern the 
world by a beneficent design. There are two 
ways by which we may approach this supreme 
knowledge: one by the soul's perception of her 
own nature, that she is the oldest and most divine 
of existing things, lord of the body by right of 
age and dignity; the other by the perception of 
the ordered motion of the stars and of all created 
objects that display the governance of an omnis- 
cient intelUgence; and these two ways are virtu- 
ally one. He will be a true worshipper of the 
gods who has attained to this knowledge of the 
soul's hegemony and of the indwelUng reason of 
the imiverse. He alone possesses that saving 
moraUty {arete soterias) which fits him to be the 969c 
ruler of himself and of the State.^ 

^ Philo Judaeus, in his Legum Allegoria (1, 63 ff.) has 
a quaint comparison of the dperr] yeviK-ri, as he calls the 
super-virtue, and the four dperal Kara fxipos with the river 
that went out of Eden to water the garden, and from 
thence was parted, and became into four heads. The doc- 
trine is Stoic as well as Platonic. See, for instance, Sto- 
baeus, Ethica VI, i. 



102 PLATONISM 

Such, freely and succinctly rendered, but I 
think not misinterpreted, is the ethical position of 
Plato in the conclusion of the Laws and at the 
end of his life. Substantially it is the same as 
the doctrine of The Republic, though the termin- 
ology is different. In both Dialogues there are 
four virtues, one of which is taken — with some 
confusion of thought, it must be admitted — now 
as parallel with the others, and now as distinct 
from them by reason of its quality of leadership 
and comprehensiveness. The Republic gave the 
double function to justice; in the Laws justice 
tends to be limited to the political virtue of right 
distribution, whereas the moral leadership is 
transferred to the reason, in such a way that wis- 
dom is treated both as one of the four cardinal 
virtues and as the queen over them all. Evi- 
dently this ambiguous position of wisdom is ex- 
plained by the fact that we are dealing with two 
kinds of knowledge, and points to a further dual- 
ism of Plato's philosophy. 

Along with the question of the unity and di- 
versity of the virtues there ran through all the 
early Dialogues another problem, which was left 
in an equally unsettled state. The morality, or 
super-virtue, into which the specific virtues had a 
fashion of merging and so escaping our search, 
was always some kind of wisdom or knowledge. 
Bravery, so soon as it became a desirable quality 
and no mere impetuosity of temper, involved a 



DUALISM OF PLATO 103 

knowledge of what things are properly to be 
feared and what are not. Temperance was 
meaningless until we acquired an understanding 
of ourselves and of what was good for us. It 
would follow that, if all these forms of virtue rest 
on a body of knowledge, they ought to be teach- 
able, like medicine or any other art ; yet in prac- 
tice there seem to be no teachers to whom a man 
can go to learn morality as he can go to a physi- 
cian to learn medicine. This paradox reached its 
climax in the Protagoras, where Socrates argued 
that theoretically all the virtues are knowledge 
yet practically are not teachable, while his an- 
tagonist held that the virtues have each their indi- 
vidual character apart from knowledge yet can 
be taught. 

It now appears that this paradox lay in the 
ambiguity of a word ; and in the later Dialogues, 
whatever may be said of the other aspects of 
Plato's philosophy, the double character of the 
relation of the mind to facts is brought out with 
a precision and dwelt on with a persistence which 
leave no doubt of his fundamental dualism. In 
The Republic the distinction is represented pic- 
torially by the bifurcated Mne, separating know- 
ledge proper from what is properly called opin- 
ion ; and thereafter these two terms are employed 
regularly for the two processes that caused the 
earlier ambiguity. The full bearing of this ter- 
minology on Plato's system must be left for an- 



104 PLATONISM 

other chapter. Here the point to observe is that 
the primary motive for making the distinction is 
rather ethical than metaphysical, as may be seen 
from the trend of the argument in the Theaetetus. 

163A The avowed purpose of this Dialogue is to de- 
termine whether knowledge and perception 
{episteme and aisthesis) are the same thing or 
different things; to discover, that is, whether we 
have any fixed and certain form of knowledge. 
But this thesis soon becomes involved with the 
subsidiary questions whether all things are in a 
state of flux and whether man is the measure of 

l^^^ all things. Twice at least these three problems 
are brought together quite definitely, but for the 
most part the discussion passes from one to an- 
other of them after the rather disconcerting man- 
ner sometimes adopted by Plato. The best clue 
to guide the reader through this labyrinth is a 
sense of what was the dominating interest in the 
author's mind; nor is this interest hard to dis- 
cover. Here, as almost everywhere in Plato, the 
bias is ethical ; the real animus of the Dialogue is 

i57d the desire to demolish the belief, shared by the 
sophists with their audiences, that there is no 
certain reality behind our sense of the good and 
the beautiful. And so, in a way, the process of 
proving is inverted ; if this stronghold of popular 
unreason is undermined, then the answers to the 
three troublesome questions will follow of them- 
selves. If you grant the existence of a principle 



DUALISM OF PLATO 105 

of goodness, fixed and immutable, then there is 
a standard of values fixed, there is something be- 
sides the flux, there is a knowledge superior to 
that depending on outer perception (which Plato 
will grant to the flux), and man, in the Prota- 
gorean sense, is not the measure of all things. 

To this end the arch-sophist Protagoras is 
brought to the bar, and under the cross-question- 
ing of Socrates is forced to admit the inclusion of 
a standard of "better" and "worse" in our judg- 
ments. But, while making this admission, he 
still clings to his dogma that man (that is, al- 
ways, man as a creature totally immersed in the 
flux) is the measure of all things; he still main- 
tains that as things seem just and beautiful to i67c 
each State, such they are as long as the State so 
judges them. Socrates retorts with the argu- 
ment that, if there is no objective and fixed re- 
ality in the moral world, no standard by which 
the degrees of better and worse can be deter- 
mined, then the use of such words as "just" and 
"beautiful" is perfectly meaningless — a conclu- 
sion against which our coromon sense revolts im- 
placably. Furthermore, though a man may as- 
sert that the just is whatever a State regards as 
better for itself in the sense of being more profit- 
able, yet no one will say, unless he is merely 
amusing himself with words, that whatever a 
State regards as profitable, and so establishes as i77d 
the law of justice, will necessarily turn out to 



106 PLATONISM 

be profitable in the event. This introduces the 
question of the future, and shows that at least the 
profitable is not measured by the present opin- 
ions of men (in other words, that to this extent 
man is not the measure), and that probably the 
justice which the sophists are so fond of connect- 
ing with profit may also be something uncon- 
trolled by opinion — something about which it 
very much behoves a man to get not opinion but 
knowledge. 

But is there any such thing as knowledge? 
How shall we take it as a guide unless we know 
what it is ? Plato has no answer to this question 
put as a problem of epistemology. We cannot, 

209E he declares, get at a knowledge of what know- 
ledge is by analysing the process of knowing, for 
the reason that this analysis implies knowledge 
of the parts, and so on ad infinitum. And again 

196D he asks, as might be asked of any one, ancient or 
modern, who thinks the tantalizing problem of 
epistemology has been solved, whether perhaps 
it was not a bit impudent ever to have supposed 
they were going to define the process of knowing 
when they did not know what knowledge is.^^ It 
is characteristic of Plato, however, that he does 
not deny the possibility of defining knowledge in 
the terms of the intellect, but only confesses the 

^^ For Plato's scepticism in regard to epistemology see 
also Charmides 169a. 



DUALISM OF PLATO 107 

failure on this occasion to reach such a definition. 
He will not step beyond the bounds of Socratic 
scepticism: so far, he says, using Socrates as his 210c 
mouthpiece, and no further my art prevails, to 
clarify the mind of the docile listener and make 
him more agreeable to his friends. 

But with this sceptical outcome as regards the 
avowed epistemological issue, the Dialogue con- 
tains two statements, one dropped casually by 
the way, the other uttered with all the impressive- 
ness at Plato's command, which permit us to see 
what positive answer Plato had in reserve. The 
former occurs in connection with a rather whim- 202B 
sical account of the aboriginal irrational elements 
underlying phenomena, which can be named but 
of which nothing can be predicated, and suggests 
that there may be similar elements of sensation 
in the soul, in regard to which the soul may be in 
a state of truth, although it cannot be said to 
know them, since knowledge comes only with 
rational discourse. ^^ The other, and more ex- 
plicit, statement is made in the digression on the i76b 

^^ This passage of the Theaetetus is, I admits obscure. 
My interpretation of it would be confirmed by a sentence 
of the Philebus (66c), as read by Ficino: HifiTrrat tolvvv, 
as ^ySovas Wefxev dXvTrov? opKra/xevoi, Kadapa.<: «7rovo/w-acrai/TCs t^S 
^v)(rj<; avTrj<; €Tn(rTrj/jLasy rats Be ala-Oya-ea-LV €7rofX€vas — puras 
nominantes animae ipsius scientias, sensus autem sequentes. 
But however this passage of the Theaetetus be taken, there 
is no possibility of misunderstanding the words in which 
Plato affirms the reality of the superrational intuition. 



108 PLATONISM 

philosophic Hfe, which, to one not familiar with 
Plato's indirect methods, might appear to be 
strangely out of place in the heart of this Dia- 
logue. Our only refuge from the evils of this 
world, says Socrates, is to render ourselves like 
unto God. In him there is no injustice, no shadow 
of wrong, but, as we conceive things, purest jus- 
tice; and there is nothing that more resembles 
God than he among us who becomes as just as 
it is possible for man to be. The knowledge 
(gnosis J superrational intuition) of this truth is 
wisdom and morality, and the ignorance of this 
truth is folly and manifest evil; and all other 
seeming wisdom is comparatively a vulgar and 
mean thing. 

The Theaetetus, so analysed, bears throughout 
on the question now imder consideration. Leav- 
ing aside as doubtful and, for the present pur- 
pose, relatively unimportant the suggestion of an 
infrarational intuition of immediate sensation, 
we have these two conclusions: an admission of 
the practical impossibility of discovering any defi- 
nition of knowledge regarded as the relation of 
human reason to objective facts, and an affirma- 
tion of the higher intuition, which is above reason 
and is true knowledge. The gist of the argument 
is the opposition between the Platonic dualism of 
knowledge and opinion and the Protagorean 
(and, in general, the sophistic) monism. Plato 
does not deny that men move about in a world of 



DUALISM OF PLATO 109 

shifting impressions, and are constrained to base 
their conduct on judgments drawn from observa- 
tion of facts which never can be complete ; in our 
practical life, so far as it is concerned with phe- 
nomena, we have only the guidance of opinion. 
To this extent he agrees with Protagoras, though 
even here he draws ethical conclusions very dif- 
ferent from those of the sophist ; but he does deny 
flatly the Protagorean dogma that this shadowy 
form of opinion is all we have. Were Protago- 
ras right he might have referred to a tadpole or a uu 
pig as Well as to a man for his measure. No, 
Plato asserts, besides opinion, whether true or 
false, man has also knowledge. The operation 
of this faculty we may not be able to analyse, but 
it is there, within our souls, giving us certain in- 
formation of the everlasting reality of righteous- 
ness and loveliness in themselves, as things apart 
from the flux, and bidding us look to the God of 
these realities for the measure of our nature. 

Now, in this duahsm of knowledge and opinion 
is found the answer to the paradoxical question 
as to the teachableness of virtue. Morality, as 
the force behind the specific virtues, is a matter 
of knowledge, whereas the specific virtues are de- 
pendent on what is commonly called knowledge 
but is really opinion ; and opinion can be formed 
by instruction, whereas knowledge cannot be. 
Thus, the virtue of temperance may be described 
as a golden mean in our action, a result of obe- 



110 PLATONISM 

dience to the precept "Nothing too much," which 
announces to each urgent desire: So far shalt 
thou go and no further. If, for example, we eat 
a certain amount and kind of food (and no chance 
intervene), we shall be healthy and enjoy the 
pleasure of health; if we transgress through ig- 
norance or wilfulness, we shall surely injure our 
health and suffer the pains of disease. And so it 
is with all the other activities of life, under which- 
ever of the specific virtues they may fall. Our 
judgment of the point at which any activity 
ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice is deter- 
mined by a calculation of consequences in plea- 
sure and pain, and the rightness or wrongness of 
our calculation will depend on our own exper- 
ience and on the similar experience of others. 
The experience of others is imparted to us by in- 
struction, and so it is that the specific virtues are 
teachable; we can go to a man of experience to 
learn the nature of temperance and bravery and 
wisdom and justice, as we can go to a physician 
to learn the precepts of his art. 

Hence the weight which Plato lays on the edu- 
cation of youth in the choice and control of 
pleasures and pains. In the average and in the 
long run the man so trained, having the tradi- 
tion of society to correct his own narrower ex- 
perience, will act instinctively on a proper calcu- 
lation. But it is to be noted that this trained in- 
stinct, though the only guide we have in our 



DUALISM OF PLATO 111 

specific acts, casts no more than a flickering light. 
Thus, bravery, when it rises to the dignity of a 
virtue, is determined by a man's opinion of what 
should be feared and what should not, and of the 
extent to which he should give rein to his im- 
pulses of hostility and self-defence. It is a reck- 
oning of the balance of pleasure consequent upon 
his own safety and upon the rewards of public 
esteem. But our judgment can never be infalli- 
ble in such matters : any man, by an error of cal- 
culation, may attack where true bravery would 
have counselled retreat, or may retreat where 
true bravery would have counselled attack. The 
outcome, moreover, is subject to hazards beyond 
the scope of his consideration. In an attack 
which from the point of view of his company is 
prudent, he may be the one who falls into the 
hands of the enemy: and he may suffer torture 
and death in such a way that his act of true cour- 
age may end, so far as he personally is concerned, 
in pain, and no pleasure at all. At the best, 
though we have an immediate intuition of plea- 
sure and pain as present realities, as soon as we 
begin to calculate consequences in order to act, 
our judgment can be verified only eoc post facto, 
and the virtues cannot be raised out of the region 
of uncertain opinion. 

This treachery of calculation is what tends to 
drag the hedonist down to the sty, bidding him 
distrust the more elusive rewards of virtue and 



112 PLATONISM 

lay hold of any pleasure near at hand whose pun- 
ishment is not swift and visible. If there be any 
steady law of conduct it must be referred to a 
principle freed from the chances of fortune and 
so fortified against the immediate cravings of 
appetite. For this principle, as we have seen, 
Plato turned to the moral impulsion behind the 
specific virtues. In the Laws he identified it with 
wisdom, but with a wisdom drawn from the soul's 
knowledge of herself as divine and akin to God, 
a wisdom quite different from the virtue identi- 
cal with a calculating prudence. In The Repub- 
lic the same moral impulsion was called justice; 
but there again justice was so defined as to be 
synonymous with a form of knowledge; it was 
the intuition commanded in the Delphic saluta- 
tion "Know thyself," as the virtues are taught in 
the other Delphic precept, "Nothing too much." 
And this higher knowledge, as we have also seen, 
is not vague or empty of content, but rich with 
fruition. It, too, is concerned with a state of 
feeling — ^not those pleasures, in which the opin- 
ions of virtue have their range, but the happiness 
present in the soul with the purpose to act virtu- 
ously and dependent on the purpose alone. No 
man can impart this knowledge to us, though he 
may exhort us to look more intently into the na- 
ture of our being ; the knowledge of the happiness 
of morality is not teachable, but comes to each of 
us secretly, by what Plato, speaking mythologic- 
ally, caUs a "divine chance." 



DUALISM OF PLATO 113 

I would not for a moment maintain that no 
difficulties adhere to this dualism, partly implicit 
and partly exphcit in the philosophy of Plato, 
which sets pleasure, virtue, and opinion in one 
group, and over against them happiness, moral- 
ity, and knowledge. We are here, let us admit 
frankly, in the region of paradox. Indeed dual- 
ism is but another name for that Socratic Para- 
dox which results from accepting simultaneously 
both the spiritual affirmation of Socrates and his 
identification of virtue with knowledge (that is, 
with opinion, as something distinct from the 
knowledge of the spirit). It is of the nature of 
the dualistic intuition that it cannot be ultimately 
explained by reason, but we can perhaps make its 
operation clearer by an illustration. 

When Socrates lay in prison, awaiting the day 
of execution, he was visited by one of his power- 
ful friends, Crito, who pressed money upon him 
to bribe his way out and so to escape an unfair 
doom. Socrates' reply is given in the Dialogue 
that goes by the name of his friend. The conver- 
sation turns on two main theses. First Socrates 
asks Crito whether he still abides by their old de- 
cision of former days, that it is better, no matter 
what the circumstances may be, to do justice than 
to do injustice, better to suffer injustice patient- 
ly, if needs be, than to do wrong in return? To 
this thesis Crito is committed, and he will not now 
draw back. And note that there is no real dis- 



114 PLATONISM 

cussion here, but a direct appeal to the moral in- 
tuition; for, as Socrates declares, between one 
who assents to this affirmation of the spirit and 
one who dissents there is no common ground of 
debate, but each necessarily will look with con- 
tempt on the views of the other. Then fol- 
lows the question: What is the right course of 
conduct for me, Socrates, under the particular 
circumstances in which I am now placed? How 
shall I do justice? This is not a matter of intui- 
tion, to be settled by an affirmation, but a point 
to be argued out and decided on its merits, like 
any other specific case of virtue. And what is 
the argument? In the first place Socrates re- 
peats the statement of the Apology, that we have 
no certain knowledge of death whether it be a 
good thing for man or an evil thing. So far the 
principle of scepticism rules. But men have 
learned by experience that it is a good thing for 
a city to be governed by laws ; since then only is 
order possible, and that like-mindedness of citi- 
zens on which hang all the strength and blessings 
of civilization. By our very birth and education 
and volimtary residence in a city we have entered 
into a kind of contract with it, and we ought 
either to submit to the laws as they are or to bring 
about the passage of other laws. That is what 
men mean by justice, that we should obey the 
behests of the city or persuade it to think other- 
wise ; and, in view of our ignorance of death and 



DUALISM OF PLATO 115 

money and so many other things of the sort that 
seem to people to affect their personal welfare, 
the pursuit of justice is probably the best calcu- 
lation of pleasures a man can make. Moreover, 
by obedience to the laws of men we shall put our- 
selves into harmony with the spirit of law in gen- 
eral, and with the peaceful and orderly move- 
ment of the universe. Therefore, Socrates rea- 
sons, it is better for me to stay here where I am, 
and to abide by the voice of the laws of Athens. 
Now, in this discussion of law and duty So- 
crates says not a word which would not have been 
accepted by John Stuart Mill. Wherein, then, 
is the difference between Socrates' position and 
that of a high-minded utihtarian? A¥hen it 
comes to the decision of a particular case, they 
argue and decide alike ; both reach the same defi- 
nition of what is just, and both say that this deci- 
sion must be followed at the risk of losing money 
and comfort and even hfe itself. So far they 
agree, but at this point they part company, and 
their ways are in opposite directions. To Mill 
there was nothing beyond the decision, nothing 
(in his philosophy taken literally, that is, for in 
his character he was inconsistent) to give vahdity 
to the decision of virtue when it might be weak- 
ened by doubts. For, after all, any such calcula- 
tion as this made by Socrates, and as would be 
made by Mill, is in the region of guessing ; unless 
it can be reinforced by some surer intuition, it 



116 PLATONISM 

will yield to men in general only a treacherous 
foundation for conduct, and this enforcing power 
of intuition is precisely what Socrates had and 
what utilitarianism lacks. Suppose there was an 
error in the reasoning of Socrates when he re- 
fused the opportunity, as Crito says, not only to 
carry on a life of virtue but to provide for the 
proper training of his children — suppose Crito 
was right and Socrates was wrong (as the case 
might well be) , what recompense was there for a 
man who sacrificed himself for an empty name? 
And without the assurance of some criterion 
other than the very fallible calculations of reason 
and the conflicting precepts of tradition, from 
what source was a man in Socrates' position to 
draw the strength of character that should with- 
stand the temptations of the nearer pleasure? 
There is no such resource in the philosophy of 
hedonism. But Socrates did not waver. He 
knew that it was better to do justice than to do 
injustice, not because justice would probably 
bring to him the larger pleasure as a man living 
in a city and universe of law (though this too he 
guessed) , but because the very intention of doing 
justice certainly brought its sufficient reward. 
The feeling of happiness associated with moral 
purpose was so much more real to him than were 
the stings of pleasure and pain that, under its 
compulsion, he could afford to laugh at the 
doubts which might weaken his loyalty to ap- 



DUALISM OF PLATO 117 

parent virtue by contrasting the security of im- 
mediate pleasure with the insecurity of a long 
calculation, and by pitting the intensity of per- 
sonal desires against the duller sense of partici- 
pating in the public good. 

Fortunately for the world the conmion sense 
of mankind is more in conformity with a hedon- 
ism complemented, as it was in Socrates, by in- 
tuition and scepticism, than with a hedonism that 
thinks it unnecessary to look for any guide be- 
yond the hght of its own tremulous lamp. 



CHAPTER V 



PSYCHOLOGY 



Plato's ethical philosophy is connected, as any 
system of ethics must be connected, with a par- 
ticular way of regarding the soul. Its end is in 
psychology, and we are thus brought face to face 
with a problem of consistency : the soul under his 
analysis fell into three faculties (if we may use 
this word without its modern psychological impli- 
cations), yet his ethics is essentially dualistic. 
How are these two positions to be reconciled? 

The apparent discrepancy of Plato's philo- 
sophy in this matter has troubled more than one 
of the commentators on The Republic, In a 
602c note on a critical passage of the tenth book James 
Adam has these significant words : 

"The reasoning from here to 607a has been 
supposed to rest on a psychological theory irre- 
concilable with that of Book iv, to which the dis- 
cussion expressly alludes (in 602e). See for ex- 
ample Krohn PI, St, p. 255 and Pfleiderer Zur 
Losung etc. p. 38. It is true that Plato is here 
content, in view of his immediate purpose, with 
a twofold division of the soul into (1) a 
rational and (2) an irrational, alogiston (604d, 
605b), or lower element. But the resemblance 
between the two theories is greater than the dif- 

118 



PSYCHOLOGY 119 

ference, for (a) the logistikon is common to both, 
and (b) on its moral side the irrational element 
appears sometimes as the e pithy metikon (606d), 
sometimes as a degenerate form of the thymo- 
eides (604e, 606a)." 

The point is well taken, and is enforced chiefly 
by the characterization of the good man under 
the stress of adversity. "There is," says Plato, 604a 
"a principle of reason and law in him which com- 
mands him to resist, and there is hkewise the 
sense of his misfortmie which is forcing him to 
indulge his sorrow. But when a man is drawn in 
contrary directions at once in regard to the same 
object, we say that there must be two elements 
in him. The law affirms that to be patient under 
suffering is best, and that we should not give way 
to impatience, since in fact it is not clear whether 
our state is good or evil, and anyhow nothing is 
gained by resentment ; none of the events of hu- 
man Uf e is of serious importance, and grief stands 
in the way of that state which we need to attain as 
speedily as possible. Then there is the other 
principle, which inclines us to recollection of our 
troubles and to lamentations, and can never have 
enough of them; this we may call irrational, fu- 
tile, and cowardly." Such a description admits 
of no ambiguity. On one side it sets the govern- 
ing, controlling, inhibiting energy of the soul, 
working to the end of law and reason; on the 
other side, all that part of the soul which suffers 



120 PLATONISM 

and desires and which is repugnant to self-mas- 
tery. Mr. Adam was correct in arguing that this 
analysis is only superficially inconsistent with the 
psychology of the fourth book, but he errs, I 
think, in holding that the dualism here imposed 
on the threefold division of the faculties is for 
immediate purposes alone, rather than funda- 
mental to Plato's philosophy. He might have 
been warned of this error by a consideration of 
the series of portraits of the eighth and ninth 
books, from which was drawn the account of the 
Tyrant's Progress, and which is avowedly a re- 
turn to the interrupted argument of the fourth 
book. 

What is the cause of that degeneration from 
the highest type of liberty down to the basest 
condition of slavery? The just and good man is 
called the aristocrat for the reason that he is 
governed by the moral force which is the better 
of the two halves of his nature. When the worse 
half breaks from this control and begins to act 
for itself, the balance of the soul is disturbed ; but 
the rebellious desires are still at first of a specious 
kind, the ambitions of elevated rank and au- 
thority which have very much the look of pure 
virtues. The next step is taken when the weight 
of desire passes to a lower form of ambition, and 
the man begins to crave money as the material 
reality beneath everything the world reverences. 
For a while the spendthrift passions are held in 



PSYCHOLOGY 121 

subjection by a kind of mild compulsion. But 
this balance is precarious; the desire for money, 
following the nature of any desire, grows more 
and more excessive, imtil the very excess leads to 
a revolt of the other desires. Then we see the 
emergence of the distracted soul, across which all 
desires move with equal authority and to which 
all passions are in turn equally alluring. Again 
the change comes from the tendency to unbridled 
expansion which is in the very nature of desire. 
Soon there is a contention among all the loosened 
passions, until some one evil and devouring lust 
gathers strength above its rivals, and snatches a 
despotism, the last and most miserable state of a 
man's soul. 

Certainly if anything is evident throughout 
the whole course of this decline, it is that the soul 
is regarded as composed of two warring elements, 
and that the descending steps are measured by 
the degree to which one of these elements throws ^ 
off obedience to the other. The sum of the mat- 
ter is in the words of the Laws: "To have won 85oc 
the victory over pleasures, this is to live happily, 
the life of felicity, but to fail before them is the 
very opposite." This does not mean, as the pre- 
ceding discussion of the Laws abundantly proves, 
that pleasure is in itself a thing to be scorned, or 
is in its nature necessarily destructive of happi- 
ness; but it does mean that pleasure may on oc- 
casion draw us away from our true goal, and that 



122 PLATONISM 

happiness is dependent on the dominance of one 
member of the soul over the other. 

The duahsm of Plato's psychology is less en- 
tangled in other Dialogues where the classifica- 
tion of the virtues does not come so prominent- 
ly into view as in The Republic, Thus, in the 
PhaedOj, it falls into rather a harsh opposition be- 
tween the soul and the body {soma = sema) , and 
in this form, unfortunately, it was to be taken up 
by the Christian Platonists and developed into an 
asceticism which, with Plato, had been only a 
passing phase of philosophic bitterness. It is to 
be remembered, also, that even in the Phaedo the 
"body" is really not so much the material flesh as 
a symbol for all that part of the soul which is 
swayed by the baser desires. For, as it is argued 
i29e ff. in the first Alcihiades, a man is a different thing 
from the body which he uses, neither is he both 
body and soul, but soul ; and in the tenth book of 
The Republic, where Plato is arguing for im- 
mortality, he traces the source of evil to the soul 
itself, as distinct from the body, with no uncer- 
tain note. So strong is this thought of the inner 
dualism that in his later years he would even 
speak as if we were not one soul but two. In this 
way his dualism colors the mythology of the 
Timaeus: 

69c "He himself [God] was creator of the divine, 
but the creation of the mortal he laid upon his 
offspring to accomplish. And they, in imitation 



PSYCHOLOGY 128 ' 



of his act, took from him the immortal element of i 

soul, and then fashioned about her a mortal body, j 

and gave her all the body as a vehicle; and in it ,j 

they framed also another kind of soul, which is ' 

mortal, having in itself dreadful and compelling j 

passions — pleasure first, the greatest incitement j 

to evil, then pains that frighten away good, and 
besides these confidence and fear, witless counsel- i 

lors both, and wrath hard to appease, and allur- | 

ing hope. Having mingled these with irrational 
sensation and with love that stops at nothing, \ 

they composed as they could the mortal soul of i 



man." 



In the LawSj by a change of allegory, the soul 896c fif. 
is regarded as herself the creator, instead of the 
created, and as such the source of all good and 
evil in the world, of what is beautiful and what is 
ugly, just and imjust. From her proceed the 
passions and powers of man, and from her pro- 
ceed the motions that rule the heavens and every 
moving creature — yet not from one soul but from 
two souls, the beneficent and the worker of all 
that is contrary. 

In view of this persistent dualism it is clear 
that the three faculties of Plato's psychology 
are not independently co-operative powers, but 
merely different phases, sometimes sharply dis- 
sociated, sometimes merging into one another, of 
the activity of what we may call, using a termin- 
ology strange to Plato, the personal element of 
our being. The faculties might have been four 



124 PLATONISM 

or five or any other number, instead of three, if 
the analysis of the virtues had been carried fur- 
ther — if, for instance, bravery had been subdi- 
vided into endurance and aggressiveness. The 
only obscurity in this scheme is chargeable to 
Plato's careless treatment of the word "reason'' 
when he passes from epistemology to ethics. By 
employing the same term now for the higher of 
the two elements of the soul, and now for the 
prudential faculty of the lower element, he intro- 
duced, or at least encouraged, an ambiguity which 
has never to this day been purged from the body 
of philosophy, as any one may know who will 
trace the meaning of "reason" and "rational" 
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
down into modern literature. In one place you 
will find Plato drawing the reason close to the 

411c «F. desires, as in the passage of The Republic which 
deals with education imder the two heads of 
"music" (including hterature, etc.) and gymnas- 
tic. Here reason and the concupiscent faculty, 
taken together as opposed to the thymos, have 
their discipline in music, whereas the thymos is 

4391 s. fortified by gymnastic. Yet in another part of 
the same Dialogue the thymos is regarded as the 
spirit of indignation and self-respect which is 
normally on the side of judgment against the 
desires. In either case the assimilation of the 
reason whether to the desires or to the thymos 
shows that we have to do here with a prudential 



PSYCHOLOGY 1«5 

faculty different in kind from reason regarded 
as an element of the soul set over against all the 
practical activities. 

A hint of this double nature of reason may be 
found in the most picturesque presentation of 
Plato's psychology — the famous metaphor of the 
chariot in the Phaedrus, Superficially, the divi- 246a £f. 
sion is tripartite, as made by the driver, repre- 
senting reason, and his two horses, the one docile, 
the other self-willed; but, more carefully consid- 
ered, the image shows the usual dualism under a 
novel guise. When the soul comes into sight of 
a fair and beloved object, the wild horse rushes 
forward to satisfy his base lust, dragging along 
with him his mate (the thymos, as instinctive self- 
respect) and the driver. At first the driver and 
the better horse resist ineffectually ; but of a sud- 
den there comes to the di'iver a remembrance of 
the pure eternal beauty he has beheld in a pre- 
vious existence with the gods, and, as it were, 
smitten by that vision, he himself is thrown back- 
wards and pulls both the horses to their haunches. 
By this check the driver and the docile horse gain 
control of the concupiscent beast, and the soul is 
turned from its evil deed. The power of resis- 
tance came at last, not from the driver as a de- 
liberative agent, but from the knowledge that 
belongs to a diviner reason, and strikes into him 
after the manner of the Christian's grace of God. 

But Plato's symbolism is interpreted more 



126 PLATONISM 

Republic 439E clcaply by the story of a certain lieontius, who, 
coming up to the city one day by the north wall, 
was troubled by the sight of some dead bodies 
lying in the place of execution. For a while he 
was divided between his curiosity and a feeling of 
repulsion, and stood with closed eyes, debating 
with himself. But at last his desire got the mas- 
tery, and, forcing open his eyes, he ran up to the 
place, crying, "Look, ye wretches, take your fill 
of the lovely spectacle!" The moral of the tale, 
Plato adds, is the distinction between the thymos 
and the desires, as proved by their enmity. But 
it suggests something more than that. The de- 
liberative pause of Leontius, while reason and 
self-respect are contending with desire, points to 
the function of that element of the soul, whether 
it be called reason or by another name, which is 
above them all, and upon whose exercise rests 
the possibility of forming judgments and deter- 
mining our actions.^ The problem of Platonic 

^ Schleiermacher, in his note to Republic 572a, gives a 
clear statement of this separate governing element of the 
soul: "Ich will aber hier, wenn auch nur im Vorbeigehen, 
aufmerksam darauf machen, wie ausser den dreien, dem be- 
gehrlichen, dem eifrigen und dem verniinftigen, noch ein 
vierter, namlich der von jenen dreien bald dieses bald jenes 
beschwichtigende oder aufregende sich einschleicht ; so dass 
nun dieser hier der Fuhrmann wird, und wir ein Dreige- 
spann haben nebst einem Fuhrmann, wie es scheint, indem 
was im Phaidros der Fuhrmann war, hier als Ross erseheint, 
und zwar nicht in einer in gleichem Grade bildlichen Dar- 
stellung." — This is good Platonism, except that Schleier- 



PSYCHOLOGY 127 

psychology is to define, or at least to understand 
as clearly as may be possible, the operation of 
this dualism. In a general way the substratum 
of the lower element of the soul is easily found in 
the desires and emotions (the thymos is, succinct- 
ly, the desires as these assume the guise of per- 
sonal emotions) ; the difficulty is in coming to 
terms with the higher element. 

It is tempting to associate this governing prin- 
ciple with the free will, or liberum arhitrium, 
which has been a theme of metaphysical debate 
ever since it was brought into prominence by the 
contest of the orthodox Church with the Pelag- 
ians ; and there is, perhaps, no better way to ob- 
tain a clear notion of the intention of Plato's psy- 
chology than by turning aside for a moment to 
the last great discussion of this question in mod- 
ern times. For the support of the Calvinistic 
doctrine of predestination against the Pelagian 
error of the Arminians, Jonathan Edwards had, 
in his Treatise Concerning Human Affections, 
denied the existence of any such faculty as the 
will in the ordinary sense of the word. The will, 
or the heart as he calls it, is merely the inclination 
of the soul towards the good as this is present to 
us at the moment of action. This thesis was later 
taken up and developed in his inquiry into the 

macher's aufregende, though a literal translation of Plato's 
KLvr)<Ta<i, shows^ as I hope to prove^ a mistaken notion of the 
action of the governing faculty. 



128 PLATONISM 

Freedom of the Will. Here, to clinch his argu- 
ment for the identity of will and inclination, he 
uses the illustration of a drunkard who has liquor 
before him and must choose whether to drink or 
not; and he proves that the so-called volition of 
the drunkard will certainly be in accord with 
"what, in the present view of his mind, taken in 
the whole of it, is most agreeable to him." That 
is well; and so far Plato would assent, for there 
is no place in his psychology, any more than in 
the theology of Calvin, for a positive faculty of 
the will as a force independent of our inclination. 
But Edwards failed to discriminate sufficiently 
between two classes of motives impelling a man 
to action : the immediate physical craving and the 
memory of pains and pleasures stored up in the 
mind by experience. Now, these latter are more 
sluggish in operation than the former; they are 
at a disadvantage, so to speak, unless the phys- 
ical desire is held in check until they acquire a 
kind of cumulative weight. The liberty of the 
soul might thus appear to reside, not in the de- 
termination of a positive will — which must in- 
deed obey the strongest motive at the moment of 
action — but in the power of holding all motives 
in suspense until a due balance has been struck. 

In fact the theory did come to Edwards in just 
this form, and in two sections of his Inquiry he 
makes a diversion from his main argument to 
consider it. The actual treatise against which he 



PSYCHOLOGY 1«9 

directs his contentions, though he does not name 
it, was undoubtedly Isaac Watts's Essay on the 
Freedom of Will in God and the Creature; but 
the theory itself has stronger authorities behind 
it than this mild Arminian, and needs to be con- 
sidered historically. Its lineage goes back to 
Descartes. 

The Cartesian philosophy made no generic dis- 
tinction between the will and the understanding ; 
it regarded the will as the act of selection among 
the various data of the senses, by which act we 
form the ideas in the understanding. The sen- 
sations themselves are not deceptive, and if we 
fall into error, it is because the will draws infer- 
ences and makes inadequate judgments. Truth 
is measured by the clearness of our ideas, and 
right action is dependent on the truth of the ideas 
behind it. 

Malebranche also taught that we act in ac- 
cordance with our inclinations and that our incli- 
nations are the result of our judgments; but he 
goes beyond Descartes in his ethical deductions. 
Error, he thinks, is due to the inherent restless- 
ness of the human will, which is drawn to the 
multiplicity and vanity of sensible objects, and 
so fails to make true judgments of the value of 
things. Hence the process of attaining a true 
judgment is by an act of attention on the part of 
the mind;^ and hence, also, the general law of 

^ Recherche de la Verite, Preface. 



130 PLATONISM 

truth and conduct: "We should never give our 
entire assent except to propositions which appear 
so evidently true that we cannot reject them with- 
out feeling an inner pain and the secret reproach 
of reason ; that is to say, without knowing clearly 
that our unwillingness to assent would be an 
abuse of our liberty."^ 

The idealism of Malebranche, variously mod- 
ified in the transit, was brought into England by 
John Norris, who, though himself an Oxonian, 
forms an interesting link between the Cambridge 
Platonists of the seventeenth century and the 
deistic writers of the eighteenth. He takes, for 
our purpose, an important step forwards by as- 
sociating Malebranche' s "act of attention" ex- 
plicitly with the problem of the freedom of the 
will.* The place of Norris in English philosophy 
has received such scant consideration that it may 
be worth while to quote from him at some length 
on this point : 

"In the first place 'tis agreed betwixt us that 
there must be a to eph' hemin, some principle of 

^ Ibid. I, ii, 4 ; repeated^ VI, i. 

* The connection between attention and liberty is, no 
doubt, implicit in Malebranche. Thus he says (I, i, 2) that 
liberty consists in the ''ability to suspend one's judgment 
and one's love," and "to make our natural inclinations ter- 
minate in some particular object." But I do not remember 
that he has brought this notion of attention and liberty to 
bear clearly on the problem of the freedom of the will, and 
passages of the sixth book place the act of attention itself in 
a secondary, or at least an ambiguous, position. 



PSYCHOLOGY 131 

free agency in man. All that does or can fall un- 
der debate is what is the primary and immediate 
subject of this free agency. Now this, being a ra- 
tional perfection, must be primarily subjected 
either in the imderstanding or in the will, or, to 
speak more accurately, either in the soul as in- 
telligent or in the soul as volent. That the latter 
cannot be the root of liberty will be sufficiently 
clear if this one proposition be fully made out, 
viz., that the will necessarily follows the dictate 
of the understanding, or that the soul necessarily 
wills as she understands. 

"Now for the demonstration of this, I shall de- 
sire but this one postulatum, which I think all the 
schools of learning will allow me, viz., that the 
object of the soul as volent is apparent good, or 
that the soul cannot will evil as evil. Now good 
apparent, or evil apparent, is the same in other 
terms with that which is apprehended or judged 
to be good or evil respectively. ... If, there- 
fore, good apparent be the object of the will, 
good apprehended will be so too, and consequent- 
ly the soul necessarily wills as she understands; 
otherwise she will choose evil as evil, which is 
against the supposition. . . . 

"The soul, therefore, as volent cannot be the 
immediate subject of liberty. If, therefore, there 
be any such thing as free agency, the seat of it 
must be in the soul as intelligent. But, does not 
the soul necessarily understand as the object ap- 
pears, as well as she necessarily wills as she un- 
derstands? She does so, and therefore I do not 



132 PLATONISM 

place the seat of liberty in the soul as judging, 
or forming a judgment, for that I confess to be 
determined by the appearance of things. But, 
though it be necessary that the soul judge as 
things appear, yet 'tis not necessary ( except only 
in self-evident propositions) that things should 
appear thus or thus, but that will wholly depend 
upon the degrees of advertency, or attention; 
such a degree being requisite to make the object 
appear thus, and such a degree to appear other- 
wise. And this advertency is that wherein I 
place the seat of free agency. Lower than this I 
discern not the least glimpse of it, and higher I 
cannot go. Here, therefore, I conceive I have 
good reason to fix, and to affirm that the only 
autexousion of the soul consists in her having an 
immediate power to attend or not attend, or to 
attend more or less. I say an immediate power; 
for if you will have an express act of the will 
interposed, that act of the will must have a prac- 
tical judgment, that judgment an objective ap- 
pearance, that appearance another attention, that 
attention another will, and so on ad infinitum, I 
think it therefore reasonable to stop at the first." 

These passages occur in Norris's reply (un- 
dated) to a letter of Henry More's dated Janu- 
ary 16, 1685/6, but the correspondence was not 
printed until 1688, when it formed a supplement 
to Norris's Theory and Regulation of Love,'^ 
Locke's Essay appeared two years after the pub- 

^ I quote from the second edition, 1694. 



PSYCHOLOGY 133 

lication of this correspondence, and it is a nice 
question to guess whether he had felt the injflu- 
ence of Norris's theory. The writer of the letter 
he afterwards characterized as "an obscure en- 
thusiastic gentleman," nor was he at all of the 
school of Malebranche ; yet one of the most strik- 
ing chapters of the Essay (I, xxi) is substantially 
a development of the Norrisian conception of 
free will and attention. 

Locke starts with a thoroughly hedonistic con- 
ception of life. That which is properly good or 
bad, he says, is nothing but barely pleasure or 
pain, the distinction, of course, being carried into 
the distant consequences of our acts. Happiness 
is not different in kind from pleasure, but is 
merely the utmost pleasure we are capable of, 
and misery the utmost pain. All men naturally 
desire happiness, and would always act with this 
end in view, were will and desire the same thing. 
But the will is perfectly distinguished from de- 
sire ; it is determined not by what we desire, that 
is happiness, but by the most important and 
urgent uneasiness we at any time feel. And this 
follows from the nature of our happiness and 
misery. All present pain, whatever it be, makes 
a part of our present misery ; but all absent good 
does not at any time make a necessary part of our 
present happiness, nor does the absence of it 
make a part of our misery. On the other hand 
change itself is attended with some uneasiness; 



134 PLATONISM 

so that, unless the absence of good in some way is 
made present to us by a feeling of uneasiness, it 
does not move us to change our conduct. Thus, 
all men desire happiness, but when they are rid 
of pain they are apt to take up with the pleasure 
at hand. 

Wherein then does liberty consist? It is not 
in desire, for it is a necessity of our nature to 
desire happiness. Nor is it, properly speaking, 
in the will; for freedom of the will is merely an 
external consideration, being the absence of any 
restraint preventing us from acting in accordance 
with the impulsion of present uneasiness. The 
place of liberty is in the mind, or, following 
Locke's own terminology, it is and it is not in the 
will. As a matter of fact the Essay here admits 
into the discussion a confusion of terms of which 
Edwards was not slow to take advantage. In 
one place Locke says that the "power which the 
mind has thus to order the consideration of any 
idea, or the forbearing to consider it, . . . is that 
which we call the will"; but elsewhere he takes 
the position, more consistent with his general sys- 
tem, that a man is "determined in willing by his 
own thought and judgment what is best for him 
to do." The will is evidently taken in two ways, 
first as a power of directing our thought, which is 
a matter of internal liberty; and secondly as a 
power of acting in accordance with our thought, 
which is an internal necessity and a matter of 



PSYCHOLOGY 135 

external liberty conditioned by circumstances. 
The power of directing our thought should in 
fact not have been called the will at all (unless, 
at least, it was distinguished, by some such phrase 
as the will to refrain, from the positive will as 
ordinarily conceived) ; nor is it rightly identified 
with the mind, but is above the mind and purely 
negative in character. 

Now it may sound strange to use the attribute 
"negative of that higher power in which our lib- 
erty resides." It is so termed because, as Locke 
himself says, it is the power within the mind to 
suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of 
its desires, and the consequent liberty to consider 
the objects of all the desires and weigh them one 
against the other. "In this," he continues, "lies 
the liberty man has ; and from the not using of it 
right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, 
and faults which we run into in the conduct of 
our lives, and our endeavours after happiness; 
whilst we precipitate the determination of our 
wills, and engage too soon before due examina- 
tion. To prevent this, we have a power to sus- 
pend the prosecution of this or that desire, as 
every one daily may experiment in himself. This 
seems to me the source of all liberty ; in this seems 
to consist that which is (as I think improperly) 
called free-will. For during this suspension of 
any desire, before the will be determined to ac- 
tion, and the action (which follows that determi- 



136 PLATONISM 

nation) done, we have opportunity to examine, 
view and judge of the good or evil of what we 
are going to do; and when, upon due examina- 
tion, we have judged, we have done our duty, all 
that we can or ought to do in pursuit of our hap- 
piness; and it is not a fault, but a perfection of 
our nature, to desire, will, and act according to 
the last result of a fair examination." 

Locke's view of liberty, then, is essentially the 
same as Norris's: liberty is the power of atten- 
tion, by which we may bring the ideas of absent 
good and future pleasure and of evil and pain 
into the mind in such a way that they may com- 
pete with the pressure of inmiediate pleasure or 
uneasiness. It is, to go back to Descartes, the 
power to form clear and adequate judgments. 
But by regarding this power negatively, as a 
mere act of suspension, he has given it a pro- 
founder and truer psychological standing as an 
element of the soul apart from that other element 
which reasons and remembers and desires. He 
makes it the inhibiting check by virtue of which 
reason and memory and desire are enabled to ar- 
rive at a proper balance and to result in right con- 
duct. Locke, however, did not perceive, or per- 
ceiving shirked, the radical conclusions that ought 
to follow his theory. Otherwise he would not 
have clung to the hedonism which regards happi- 
ness as nothing more than the sum of pleasure, 
but would have distinguished generically between 



PSYCHOLOGY 137 

happiness and pleasure, attributing happiness to 
that element of our being which gives us the 
power of suspension, and leaving pleasure to the 
consequences of our particular course of action. 
Some inkling of this distinction he seems to have 
had when to the ordinary balance of calculable 
pleasures and pains he added the hope and fear 
of eternal happiness or misery in another life. 
"But when," he says, "infinite happiness is put 
into one scale, against infinite misery in the other, 
if the worst that comes to the pious man, if he 
mistakes, be the best that the wicked man can 
attain to if he be in the right, who can without 
madness run into the venture?" Heaven and 
hell, as the reward attached to the moral state of 
the soul rather than to the particular virtue or 
vice of our conduct, are, in fact, the mythological 
equivalent for Plato's philosophical distinction 
between happiness and pleasure, misery and pain. 
But from the attainment of this deeper insight 
Locke was prevented by the whole weight of his 
sensational system. 

Locke's presentation of the problem of freedom 
came to Edwards apparently, as I have said, 
through the mediation of Watts. With the con- 
tentions of the ordinary Arminians, who insisted 
on a separation between will and inclination and 
sought for the source of evil in a voluntary 
choice of action contrary to known good and hap- 
piness, the Puritan divine had an easy task; and 



138 PLATONISM 

from this point of view his argument against free- 
will ("improperly" so-called, as Locke declared) 
has never been answered. But with the theory 
as developed by Descartes, Malebranche, Norris, 
and Locke his path was not so smooth. Twice, 
as I have said, he undertook to reply to Watts, 
without naming him, and once he struck at the 
heart of the question, declaring that "this suspen- 
sion of volition, if there be properly any such 
thing, is itself an act of volition" — with the ob- 
vious conclusions. To this objection Norris had 
already replied; but our Arminian might have 
argued further that the act of suspension, or will 
to refrain, really implies an essentially different 
order of choice from that of the positive will, or 
inclination. Two desires are not set before it to 
choose between, but the purpose to be self-de- 
termined or not, the intention to be in a state to 
choose wisely or not; the actual choice of one 
course of action or another must come after the 
suspension is made, and is the work of the imag- 
ination and the discursive reason balanced against 
a present desire. Returning again to the ques- 
tion whether our freedom depends on an act of 
suspension apart from the positive will, Edwards 
endeavours to evade it by pointing to its moral 
implication. "If," he says, "determining thus to 
suspend and consider be that act of the will 
wherein alone liberty is exercised, then in this 
all virtue and vice must consist. . . . According 



PSYCHOLOGY 139 

to such a supposition the most horrid crimes, 
adultery, murder, sodomy, blasphemy, &c., do not 
at all consist in the horrid nature of the things 
themselves, but only in the neglect of thorough 
consideration before they were perpetrated, 
which brings their viciousness to a small matter 
and makes all crimes equal." To which the 
Arminian might have retorted by distinguishing 
between the moral state of the agent, which de- 
pends on the degree of his self-control, and the 
virtue or vice of any particular act, which de- 
pends on the pleasure or pain ultimately result- 
ing from the act. 

Now, however Plato's psychological termin- 
ology may vary from Dialogue to Dialogue, or 
from page to page, there is always in the back- 
ground of his ethics this notion of the governing 
element of the soul as an absolute inhibition, or 
power of suspension. And despite the differ- 
ences of time and circumstance, his path to this 
position was very much like that traversed by the 
French and English philosophers. We can see 
this in his recourse to the same illustration as that 
afterwards employed by Locke and Edwards. 
In The Republic he analyses the state of a man 473b ff 
who feels a desire to drink but is restrained by 
thought of the remoter consequences. At first 
reading, the reason, as the restraining faculty, 
might seem to be merely one impulse {to koluon) 
opposing another {to heleuon) ; but look more 



140 PLATONISM 

attentively and you will detect here, in the usual 
double twist of the word "reason" when applied 
by Plato to ethical matters, precisely the Lockian 
point of view against which the Edwardsian 
argument for predestination finally broke. Rea- 
son, on the one hand, is a realizing sense of the 
future as contrasted with the present craving, but 
it is also something above both these contending 
inclinations, a something which forbids one of 
them from encroaching on the province of the 
other, and by holding them in leash makes possi- 
ble a proper balance and control. This concep- 
tion of the higher reason is, it must be admitted, 
rather latent than explicit in these passages of 
The Republic, but no room is left for doubting 
Plato's meaning if we take into account his de- 
velopment of the Socratic self-knowledge on its 
sceptical, inhibitive side. "To seem to know," says 

229c Plato in the Sophist, "when we do not know, is the 
source of those errors in judgment to which we 
are all prone"; and further, in the first Alcibia- 

1170 des:^ "Through this same ignorance, which leads 
us to think we know when we do not know, come 
our errors of practice." That is Plato's way of 
expressing Malebranche's first law of judgment 
and conduct and Locke's theory of suspension. 

® Whether genuine or not, I have not scrupled to use this 
and other passages of the first Alcibiades as thoroughly Pla- 
tonic in conception. They could be abundantly confirmed 
from the Dialogues of unquestioned authenticity. 



PSYCHOLOGY 141 

And Plato owes his supremacy in the world of 
thought to the consistency of his insight where his 
great successors drew back in a kind of meta- 
physical alarm. The Lockian position presup- 
poses a radical dualism, and has no real validity 
against predestinarianism, or any other form of 
determinism, unless this foundation is accepted, 
with all its consequences. It was because Locke, 
led astray by his sensational philosophy, failed to 
develop this truth that his theory of freedom 
misses logical finality and has been forgotten 
or rejected by most modern psychologists. In 
like manner Malebranche, though he took the 
opposite direction from Locke's, lost his splen- 
did opportunity because, in his effort to escape 
the mechanical dualism of Descartes, he fell 
into the abyss of pantheism. It was just here 
that Plato showed the depth and courage of 
his conviction, by the thoroughgoing dualism 
of his philosophy. He was, mainly, I think, 
kept in the strait and narrow path by fidelity 
to his master; and to imderstand- the nature 
of that element of the soul in which he placed 
human freedom and morality, we have yet to see 
how it is related to the most singular, and to some 
persons the most puzzling, aspect of Socrates' 
reUgious conviction. 

There is a beautiful passage in the fourth book 
of the Memorabilia which rises in tone above the 
usual wont of Xenophon, as if he were here writ- 



142 PLATONISM 

ing of things he but half comprehended. So- 
crates has been expounding the many gracious 
bounties bestowed by the gods upon mankind, 
and concludes with the supreme gift of reason 
and discourse by which men are distinguished 
from animals. "And more," he adds, "when we 
are unable to foresee what is advantageous for us 
in the future, the gods are still with us, telling us, 
if we consult them, of things to come by the voice 
of prophecy, and teaching us what is best." "But 
with you, Socrates," his interlocutor replies, "they 
seem to deal more kindly than with other men, 
since even without your asking they forewarn 
you of what should be done and what not." And 
Socrates acknowledges the truth of this favour, 
but declares that another man may attain to the 
same harmony with the divine, "if he will not 
wait to see the gods in their actual forms, but will 
be content, discerning their works, to honour and 
worship them." "For consider but the soul of 
man," he continues, "which, if it can be said of 
anything human, partakes of the divine; mani- 
festly it rules in us as a king, yet is not seen at 
all. Whence we should learn not to despise 
things invisible, but from their acts should infer 
their power, and so do honour to the divine imma- 
nence [to daimonioTi]'' 

This reverential regard for the daemonic guid- 
ance was, in fact, the religion of Socrates. One 
of the clauses of the indictment against him, it 



PSYCHOLOGY 143 

will be remembered, was that he denied the gods 
of the city, and introduced strange daemonic 
powers of his own. To this charge Xenophon 
replied by a flat contradiction, avowing that So- 
crates not only himself observed carefully the offi- 
cial worship but taught others to look for the will 
of the gods in what we should now term the State 
religion. Plato took a double course with the ac- 
cusation. First he leads the plaintiff in the trial 
to widen the charge so as to embrace pure athe- 
ism, and then pounces on the absurdity of indict- 
ing the same man for denying the existence of 
gods and for introducing new gods. Secondly, 
he brings into view the innocence and genuine 
piety of the Socratic faith. Now the truth of the 
matter would seem to be this: though there is 
every reason to believe that Socrates, like Plato 
after him, conformed in the main to the common 
religious practices of the day, being too sincerely 
sceptical to set up the dictates of private doubt 
against the intuition that might lie half-concealed 
in the popular myths, yet he was in the deepest 
sense of the word an innovator. However clum- 
sily his accusers may have formulated their in- 
dictment, and whatever political aim they may 
have had in view, they were right in seeing this. 
The daemonic voice, or divine immanence, to 
which Socrates yielded perfect obedience, may 
not have been a strange god added to the pan- 
theon, as his enemies asserted, but it did bring a 



144 PLATONISM 

new and strange faith into Athens and the world, 

Republic 496c the faith of philosophy. 

Many men since that day have asked them- 
selves what this portent might be; some have 
wondered reverentially, and some have scoffed at 
Socrates as an ordinary dupe of fanaticism if not 
the victim of an epileptic delusion. Plato, ap- 
parently having no direct cue from his master, 
interpreted the phenomenon in various ways. At 
one time he speaks of the daemon, or, more 
vaguely, the daemonic, as if it were merely the 
spark of divine intelligence implanted by God in 
every soul. Again it might be an exclusive gift 
to Socrates and, possibly, to some few others. 
Besides its looser kinship with the divine, it might 
( appear as Socrates' "guardian, a very god," or, 

more bravely, as "God." At other times the my- 
thological symbolism, if we may so call it, falls 
away, and leaves the naked spirit of the man, as 
it were the higher self speaking to the lower. So 

Hippias Major ^^eu Socratcs contrasts his own hesitating ways 

304b 298b 

with the magnificent assurance of one of the 
sophists, he ascribes the cause of his embarrass- 
ment to some daemonic chance, or fortune, that 
has taken possession of him. If he heeds the bid- 
ding of this power and refrains from everything 
but the search for truth, then the mighty men of 
the tongue deride his incompetence; and if he 
hearkens to them and regards truth as a minor 
matter in comparison with success, then he must 



PSYCHOLOGY 145 

listen to all sorts of reproaches from a man who 
is always standing by to expose him. This fel- 
low, he says, is closely related to him and lives 
in the same house with him; and when he goes 
home, scolds him in private. And who is this 
troublesome spy whom nothing can escape ? Why, 
it is just Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus ! 

All this is very tantalizing for those scholars 
who must put a ticket and a name on everything. 
But one fact is certain: whether it be a god, or 
very God, or the man's self, or some less defin- 
able intimation of the divine will, the daemonic 
guide invariably takes the form of an inhibition, 
and never of a positive command. On this one 
point Plato, whom we may trust in such a matter 
above Xenophon, leaves us in no doubt whatever : 
"From childhood it has been with me," Plato 
makes Socrates say in the Apology, "as it were a 3id 
voice speaking at intervals, always warning me 
against something I had in mind to do, never 
urging me to act." It was this inhibitive aspect 
of the Socratic religion which Plato never forgot, 
and which justifies us in connecting the daemonic 
admonition symbollically with the principle of 
liberty and morality in the Platonic psychology. 
There is a phrase in the first Dialogue with Al- iosa 
cibiades, whether Plato's or some good Platon- 
ist's, which I have always cherished as a pecu- 
liarly happy attempt to name the unnamable. 
Socrates is explaining to the petulant youth why 



146 PLATONISM 

for so many years, while other admirers were pay- 
ing assiduous court, he alone has refrained until 
now. "The cause," he declares, "was nothing 
human, but some daemonic check (daimonion 
enanti6ma)y The incident is trivial; but in 
these words I seem to see the Socratic religion 
and the Platonic philosophy bound together by 
an indissoluble bond. We may not know what 
this daemonic or, as I have elsewhere translated 
it, this inner check is ; we may not know why and 
how it acts, or why it does not act, but we do 
know that the clarity of our spiritual perception 
and the assurance of our freedom depend on 
keeping this will to refrain distinct from any 
conception of the will as a positive force. 

We touch here on the mystery of the spiritual 
life. Men are loath to accept this purely nega- 
tive view of what is highest in their being; every 
instinct of the concupiscent soul cries out against 
this complete severance between the law of the 
spirit and the law of nature, and the human heart 
revolts from it with all the energy and the tenac- 
ity of its craving for flattery. Men argue in their 
calmer moods that such a philosophy leads no- 
where save to utter abnegation of life and to a 
quietism that promises only the peace of death. 
In their moments of exaltation they appeal to the 
stronger emotions and, as they think, deeper con- 
solations of a religion that clings to faith in a per- 
sonal God who has manifested himself in human 



PSYCHOLOGY 147 

form with passions like unto man's. All these 
arguments and repudiations I know; but, withal, 
I read Plato, and then read in my own soul, and 
the book and the voice of consciousness are one in 
replying that the truth of our being can be found 
only in the hard fact of dualism, and that the 
spirit, if we would define it, can be expressed only 
in terms of negation. Nor has this truth ever 
been forgotten by the world. If you turn to those 
Christian theologians who have most wrestled 
with language to give a name to their God, you 
will find that the attributes allowed to him are 
all merely negatives of things we know by our 
senses."^ And so it is in the higher schools of phi- 
losophy. The Oxford idealism of T. H. Green 
is by no means purely Platonic, and its reduction 
of dualism to a relation between consciousness 
and nature tends to obscure the dualism within 
consciousness itself which is the more important 
aspect of the problem; yet Green's principle of 
consciousness is at least Platonic in this, that it 
can be stated only in terms of negation. "As to 

^ "In our attempts to express what we conceive the Best 
of Beings and the Greatest of Felicities to be, we describe 
by the exact Contraries of all that we experience here — the 
one as infinite, /^comprehensible, /mmutable, etc., the other 
as mcorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth not away. At 
all events, this Coincidence, say rather Identity, of Attri- 
butes is sufficient to apprize us that to be inheritors of bliss 
we must become the children of God." — Bishop Leighton, 
quoted by Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection. 



148 PLATONISM 

what that consciousness in itself or in its com- 
pleteness is," he says, "we can only make nega- 
tive statements. That there is such a conscious- 
ness is implied in the existence of the world; but 
what it is we only know through its so far acting 
in us as to enable us, etc."^ It is still our fate 
that the command of morality is "Thou shalt 
not," and they who would worship God "in spirit 
and in truth" must worship Him as the spirit 
that denies, and they who would be philosophers, 
lovers of truth, must look to a wisdom that warns 
us only to abstain. He is the wise and good man 
who need not say, as Bolingbroke was obliged to 
say in an hour of remorse: "My genius, unlike 
the demon of Socrates, whispered so softly that 
very often I heard him not, in the hurry of those 
passions by which I was transported." 

Yet it is equally true that the effects of the 
admonition are of the most positive sort, as can 
be seen in the power and influence of the whole 
life of SoQrates. No doubt the inhibition kept 
him from political activity — Jesus, too, it will be 
remembered, refrained from politics — but it 
guided him also to the noblest form of patriotism, 
withholding him from illegal acts at the bidding 
of tyrants who held life and death in their hands, 
and restraining him- voluntarily in gaol when 
bribery would have opened the gates in a mo- 
ment. It bade him subordinate his own wel- 

^ Prolegomena § 51. 



PSYCHOLOGY 149 

fare to those laws of the State to which he felt 
himself bound by a kind of tacit contract, and 
thus enabled him, as he thought, to bring himself 
into harmony with the unwritten laws of the uni- 
verse of which the enacted laws of society are, as 
it were, the sisters. Being subject to law, he 
should be in unison also with the gods whose 
word the law is. Hence his fearlessness of death 
and his terrifying calmness on the field of bat- 
tle. Hence the vigour of his morality, and the 
preservation of his chastity against such attacks 
of lust as are described with appalling freedom 
in the last scenes of the Symposium, Hence his 
resolute disregard of the conflicting opinions of 
men, and his loyalty to the testimony of his own 
soul when it prohibited the retahation of evil for 
evil, though at any price of suffering and oblo- 
quy. The same warning voice guided him in the ^292^5 
rejection of undesirable disciples, and it was 
noted that those who came to him most clearly 
under the divine permission were speediest and 
surest in their spiritual growth. Through one of 
these disciples it made him the teacher of Greece, 
and the apostle to the world. The philosophy of 
Plato is that same voice speaking with all the 
splendid powers of persuasion. 

The question of the freedom of the will was 
forced into the domain of theology by the desire 
to vindicate God from the imputation of evil and 
to hold man accountable for his actions. And 



150 PLATONISM 

the problem of philosophic dualism goes back to 
the same instinctive belief in human responsibil- 
ity. If a man is responsible for his acts, then he 
must have been free to choose between conflict- 
ing impulses ; and, as we have seen, this freedom 
can exist only by virtue of an inhibitive power of 
the soul, the so-called will to refrain, entirely 
distinct from the positive will which is determined 
by the final predominance of one impulse over 
another. The admission of responsibility thus 
throws us back upon a radical psychological dual- 
ism and upon a cosmic dualism of good and evil 
as its counterpart. But the sense of responsibil- 
ity itself springs from our immediate feelings of 
happiness and misery. It is of the essence of 
those feelings, as distinguished from pleasure 
and pain, that we are conscious of them as de- 
pendent upon ourselves and not upon circum- 
stances; we are happy with the knowledge that 
we have chosen to act after due exercise of the 
inhibiting power, we are miserable with the know- 
ledge that we have not so chosen. Thus, the 
consciousness of happiness and misery brings 
with it a sense of responsibility; the sense of re- 
sponsibility leads us to a belief in the freedom of 
the will; the freedom of the will forces us to ac- 
cept a radical dualism, psychological and cosmic. 
The whole argument is merely a logical evolu- 
tion, so to speak, of what is implicit in the primi- 
tive fact of consciousness, since by the very con- 



PSYCHOLOGY 151 

sciousness of happiness and misery we are equally 
and immediately conscious of a radical dualism. 

Now the consciousness of happiness and mis- 
ery is certainly the fountain-head of Plato's 
ethical philosophy, and the consequent dualism 
of the soul is constantly present, sometimes im- 
plicit, sometimes clearly explicit, in his psycho- 
logy. But it cannot be said that he followed a 
perfectly consistent course in regard to the other 
two links in the chain, the dualism of good and 
evil, and the sense of responsibility. It remains, 
therefore, to examine his attitude on these two 
points, since the argument is so intimately con- 
catenated that no one link can be dropped with- 
out imperilling the whole. 

Plato's difficulties over the cosmic dualism of 
good and evil were precisely those that were later 
to trouble the theologians of Christianity: how 
shall we reconcile the presence of intrinsic evil in 
the world with faith in an omnipotent deity? 
And to escape this unanswerable contradiction it 
must be admitted that Plato more than once fell 
into the fallacy so dear to Stoics and deists: God 
must be the cause of all things, yet God cannot be 
the cause of evil; hence the maladjustment and 
wrong we see in individual things and persons are 
not essentially evil, but are the mere necessity of 
imperfection in a world of infinite parts and 
pieces. The evil of the part is the good of the 



e.g. Laws 
903b 



152 PLATONISM 

whole.^ Elsewhere Plato takes refuge in that in- 
secure form of optimism which might be called a 
half-way house between radical dualism and 

Timaeus gtoico-dcistic monism. God is good and must be 
the author of good, and the world is the best of 
possible worlds. If there is evil in it, this will be 

Ibid. 56c due to the refractoriness of the material in which 
God had to work — rather, not he himself, for 
he would not be held responsible for things as 

Ibid. 4iA they are, but the lesser gods, his offspring, to 
whom he entrusts the actual work of creation. 

And as Plato was led at times by the paradox 
that confronts all theologians to remove evil 
somehow from the first cause, or causes, of things, 
and to speak of it as if it were a mere shadow or 
negation of reality, so he was tempted by the 
Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge 

® I have called this theodicy, which virtually denies the 
reality of evil, Stoic (cf. Marcus Aurelius ii, 3, et passim) 
and deistic (cf. Shaftesbury, The Moralists i, 3, et passim), 
but it is a fallacy that lies in ambush for all theology. 
Thomas Aquinas even introduced it into the orthodox canon 
of Catholicism; thus, Summa 1, xlvii, 2; "Sicut ergo divina 
sapientia causa est distinctionis rerum propter perfectionem 
universi, ita et inaequalitatis ; non enim esset perfectum uni- 
versum, si tantum unus gradus bonitatis inveniretur in re- 
bus" ; and I, xlix, 3 : "Puta, si quis dicat naturam ignis esse 
malam, quia combussit domum alicujus pauperis. Judicium 
autem de bonitate alicujus rei non est accipiendum secundum 
ordinem ad aliquid particulare, sed secundum seipsum, et 
secundum ordinem ad totum universum." — The same denial 
of the reality of evil in human sinfulness is involved in the 
Thomist argument in regard to primary and secondary 
causes. 



PSYCHOLOGY 153 

to explain away the fact of human responsibil- 
ity. There is no avoiding this twist in Plato's ^ ^^ 
teaching; he raises the point of irresponsibility pubuc 
again and again, and in one of the later books "^^^^ 
of the Laws, where, apparently he is replying 860d s. 
to certain criticisms of Aristotle,^^ he develops 
the thesis at great length and in such a way 
as to leave no room for misunderstanding. 
And, indeed, if we believe that all men do right 
so far as they know what the right is, and if we 
limit knowledge to what is learned by perception 
and experience, how shall we escape a kind of in- 
tellectual determinism? Instead of holding men 
responsible for their wilfulness, the Platonist in 
this sense should be one to say with Christ on the 
Cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not 
what they do." As a matter of fact, Plato's ^ , _ 

•^ , ' Protagoras 

common theory of punishment as purely reme- 323c s. 
dial in function, rather than retributive, is quite ^^^ ^^"^^ 
in accordance with this view of human errancy; 
though it is to be noted that when he comes to 
deal with the practical details of criminal pro- 
cedure, he virtually allows a difference between Laws sesA 
voluntary and involimtary deeds of violence. 
These inconsistencies of Plato with his own 



^° Teichmiiller's Literarische Fehden is replete with wild ] 

conjectures, but he has, I am inclined to believe, made good i 
his contention that this excursus of the Laws is an answer 

to the strictures in the third book of the Nicomachean ] 

Ethics on the Socratico-Platonic thesis that no man errs, or ] 

sins, willingly, | 



154 PLATONISM 

philosophy of free will and dualism cannot be 
shirked ; nor should we forget that they have been 
the source, or encouragement, of a vast amount 
of twisted thinking on the capital question of evil 
and responsibility in Pagan and Christian writ- 
ers. But, withal, it is still more important to 
remember that the burden of Plato's ethical feel- 
ing is prevailingly in harmony with his philo- 
sophy. No one was more conscious than he of 
the reality of evil, when his writing is free of en- 
tanglement in a rationalizing theodicy. The evil 
379c" of life, he declares categorically, outweighs the 
good ; and in general his tendency to err is rather 
on the side of an asceticism that exaggerates the 
conflict of principles in the soul. Even in the 
Timaeus, where his deistic optimism is most 
clearly expressed, the outcome of his cosmogony, 
as we shall see in a later chapter, is an absolute 
dualism of good and evil. 

And as with the reality of evil, so it is with the 
question of responsibility. No one can have fol- 
lowed the argument of The Republic without 
perceiving that the whole discussion of justice 
and injustice, happiness and misery, is based on 
a deep and unshakable consciousness of human 
responsibility. Nor are passages lacking that 
offer another explanation than intellectual de- 
terminism for the Socratic' identification of vir- 
tue and knowledge. The principle of dualism is 
too firmly rooted in Plato's mind to permit him 



PSYCHOLOGY 155 

to dwell long in any rational evasion of reality. 
If you wish to look into his true heart, turn, for 
instance, to the opening of the fifth book of the 
Laws, where he proclaims roundly that to every 
man his whole being is double, and that all the 
honour and dishonour of the soul hang on the 
right recognition of this fact of consciousness: 
"For when a man holds not himself but others 727b 
responsible for his various faults and for the 
many and great evils that befall him, and is al- 
ways exempting himself as innocent, he is not 
really honouring his soul, as he thinks, but the 
very contrary." Ignorance and weakness may 
be regarded as the cause of evil, and are indeed 
the cause, if rightly considered, but behind them 
lies the original and mysterious power of self- 
love (philautia) : 

"The greatest evil to men, generally, is one Laws 731D 
which is innate in their souls, and which a man is 
always excusing in himself and so has no way of 
escaping. I mean what is expressed in the say- 
ing that every man is and ought to be dear to 
himself. Whereas the truth is that this absorb- 
ing self-love is continually and in all men the 
cause of all their faults; for the lover is blinded 
in regard to the object of his passion, so that he 
is a bad judge of the just and the good and the 
beautiful, always fancying that he ought to hon- 
our what belongs to him above the truth. Yet, 
really, he who would be a great man ought not 



156 PLATONISM 

to cherish himself or his possessions, but the 
things that are just, whether they pertain to 
himself or to the conduct of another. From this 
same fault arises the common habit of regarding 
our own ignorance as wisdom, and of thinking 
we know all things when, so to speak, we really 
know nothing." 

These are words that should never be forgot- 
ten by the Platonist when Plato, for the mo- 
ment, seems to sway from his own deepest con- 
victions. They were, in fact, remembered and 
much quoted by the Platonizers of ancient 
Greece, especially by Plutarch. They may not, 
perhaps no words can, clear away the metaphysi- 
cal difficulties that beset any one who, rashly or 
sullenly, undertakes to reason out the problem 
of evil, but they contain, I suspect, the only prac- 
tical answer philosophy can give to that vexed 
question. It makes little difference whether we 
say that self-love is the source of ignorance and 
the evils that flow therefrom, or that ignorance 
is the source of self-love. Rather, the right way 
of proceeding is to grasp the distinction between 
the higher knowledge of intuition and the lower 
knowledge of things, which Plato so often makes, 
and, having firmly assured ourselves of this dis- 
tinction, to see that self-love, as the spring of 
evil, is merely another name for the absence of 
the higher knowledge. Whether we call such a 
condition self-love or self -ignorance depends on 



PSYCHOLOGY 167 

whether we regard it from one or the other of the 
two contrary poles of the "self"; it is self-love if 
regarded from the lower element of our being, 
self -ignorance if regarded from the higher ele- 
ment. It is essentially, in the one case or the 
other, a failure to submit to the law of our double 
being, a kind of indolence, or want of attention, 
at the very centre of consciousness; for self- 
knowledge is the supreme activity of a soul at- 
tending to its own business. 

Responsibihty, then, is the word we use for 
that self-knowledge which tells us that the exer- 
cise or inertia of the inner check and the happi- 
ness or misery attendant thereupon are matters 
entirely within our own jurisdiction. But we 
also know that our pleasures and pains are con- 
tingent upon forces outside of our complete con- 
trol; and here we are boimd to hold ourselves 
creatures of fate and chance, and not responsi- 
ble. In so far as the Socratic thesis may be taken 
to identify the higher knowledge and morality, 
it implies freedom and responsibility; in so far 
as it identifies practical knowledge and virtue it 
implies determinism and irresponsibihty. To 
revert to the illustration employed by Plato and 
by Locke and Edwards, let us suppose the case 
of a man before whom Hquor is set. On the one 
side he is drawn by a natural physical craving to 
drink ; on the other side are the considerations of 
expediency and inexpediency which come to him 



158 PLATONISM 

in a more or less laggard manner from the mem- 
ory of experience and from the precepts of tra- 
dition. If he exercises duly the will to refrain, so 
as to place himself in a position to form a clear 
image and judgment of the desirability or un- 
desirability of drinking, he will be acting morally 
and will be happy; his judgment may be, prob- 
ably will be, wise as well as clear, and the act of 
drinking or not drinking will probably result in 
pleasure ; though there is also the possibility that 
his judgment may be based on insufficient know- 
ledge, with the result of painful consequences. 
On the other hand, if he acts without due sus- 
pense of judgment, allowing himself to be hur- 
ried on by the physical craving or the contrary 
considerations without a proper balance of mo- 
tives, and if his judgment is then erroneous, as it 
probably will be, he will not only suffer pain as 
a consequence of his action, but will feel that he 
has acted from self-love, or self -ignorance, and 
will be miserable accordingly. Whatever his 
course, he will be conscious that he was entirely 
free to exercise the will to refrain, or the inner 
check, and will hold himself responsible for his 
happiness or misery. But he will know also that, 
at the moment of action, his positive will was 
bound to follow the predominant inclination, and 
that, as the physical craving and the weight of 
experience were determined by causes not en- 
tirely within his jurisdiction, he is not fully re- 



PSYCHOLOGY 159 

sponsible for the contingencies of pleasure and 
pain. 

There is thus an element of responsibility in 
our conduct, and there is also an element of ir- 
responsibility, and it was probably this complex- 
ity of our ethical nature that led Plato to waver 
in his attitude towards the question. And for 
the very reason that any philosophical statement 
of the problem must close with this admission of 
an irreconcilable paradox, Plato has, after his 
manner, given his final answer in the form of a 
myth, enjoying in this realm of symbols a release 
from the restricting law of scepticism. In the 
great epilogue to The Republic which describes 
the experience of men in the other world, it is 
said that the souls of the dead, after undergoing 
for a time the penalties and rewards of their for- 
mer deeds, are brought together into the pres- 
ence of the three Fates. Thereupon a prophet 
takes from the knees of Lachesis the various 
samples of lives and the lots, and from a lofty 
pulpit makes this proclamation: "The words of 
Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Ye souls of a 
day, now is the beginning of another cycle of 
mortal life and death. Your daemon will not be 
allotted to you, but you shall choose your dae- 
mon. Let him who draws the first lot have the 
first choice, and the life he chooses shall be his 
destiny. But virtue is free, and as a man hon- 
ours or dishonours her he will have more or less 



160 PLATONISM 

of her. The responsibihty hes with the chooser; 
God is justified. Even for the last comer, if he 
selects wisely and will live diligently, there is 
ready a life, not evil, with which he may be con- 
tent. Let not the first to choose be heedless, nor 
the last be dejected." So the lives are thrown 
down before the waiting souls, and the comedy 
of choosing proceeds. The moral of the allegory 
for us lies in the mixture of freedom and com- 
pulsion in the law. There is an element of haz- 
ard in the order and range of choice, yet Odys- 
seus, the wise, to whom falls the last lot, seeks 
and finds the one life he desires, finds it lying ne- 
glected by all his predecessors.^^ The selection 
when it comes is the man's own, yet there is a 
bias in the soul which leads it to make a choice in 
accordance with its previous career. Only the 
few learn from past experience, and they so very 
little. The myth of transmigration was to Plato 
a half -serious parable of the same truth that was 
conveyed to the Hindu mind by the word harma, 
which meant at once a man's voluntary deeds 
and their inevitable consequences, his freedom 
amid the coils of fate which he himself was weav- 
ing and could alone unravel: 

^^ The combination of freedom and determinism, respon- 
sibility and irresponsibility, in Plato's myth became a sub- 
ject of debate among the commentators. See Stobaeus, 
Ethica vii, 39. 



PSYCHOLOGY 161 

We harvest as the seed was sown, 
And he that scattered reaps alone; — 
So from each deed there falls a germ 
That shall in coming hves its source affirm. 

Unseen they call it, for it lurks 
The hidden spring of present works ; 
Unkxown-befgee, even as the fruit 
Was undiscovered in the vital root. 

And he that now impure hath been 
Impure shall be, the clean be clean ; 
We wrestle in our present state 
With bonds ourselves we forged — and call it 
Fate. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 



The setting of the problem we have now to 
consider is admirably given in the introduction 
to the so-called Moralia Magna of the Aristotel- 
ian school. The first to approach the question of 
ethics, says the author of this treatise, was Py- 
thagoras, who, however, erred in looking for vir- 
tues in numbers. After him came Socrates, who 
discoursed better and more copiously on these 
matters, but still faultily. For he placed the 
virtues entirely in the rational part of the soul, 
quite overlooking the irrational part and taking 
no account of the passions and the natural dis- 
positions of men. The error is patent. In the 
sciences, when we know what a thing is we have 
the science. Thus, if a man knows what physic 
is, he is thereby a physician. But with the vir- 
tues it is not so; for it does not follow that, if a 
man knows what justice is, he is himself forthwith 
just. Afterwards Plato rightly divided the soul 
into two parts, the rational and the irrational, 
and distributed the virtues accordingly. So far 
well. But Plato also erred when he mixed up his 
discussion of virtue with his discussion of the 
Good as absolute truth and being; for there is 

162 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 163 

nothing in common between these two questions. 
No doubt the good is the end and purpose of 
virtue, but this is the good as it is to us in our 
civil Hfe, and not the Good conceived abstractly 
as an Idea separated from the actual things 
which we call good. 

That is a fair summary of the ground on which 
Aristotle and later Peripatetics rested their op- 
position to the Platonic philosophy. It will be 
clear, I think, that their analysis of Plato's psy- 
chology was correct so far as it went, but was 
seriously inadequate. The more difficult pro- 
blem remains, whether they were right in reject- 
ing the doctrine of Ideas as an illogical sequence 
of psychological dualism. What were these 
Ideas, which have made such a stir in the world, 
and what is their exact place in the Platonic 
philosophy? 

Now, it may be true that, looking into our 
souls, we are obliged to state the facts of con- 
sciousness in the terms of a paradoxical dualism, 
and such a statement may have great practical 
value, but it still leaves the facts, in one sense, 
quite unexplained. What is the bond between 
the inner check, or spirit, and the concupiscent 
element of the soul? How and why does the one 
act upon the other? How even can two essenti- 
ally contrary powers exist together in one con- 
sciousness? These are the questions that reason 
thrusts upon a dualistic philosopher, and that 



164 PLATONISM 

have no rational answer. The recourse to either 
form of monism he merely refuses as contradic- 
tory to the facts of consciousness, denouncing the 
acceptance of spiritual reality alone as a false 
idealism, and the acceptance of the concupiscent 
or sensational reality alone as a false scepticism. 
The attempt to bring the two terms closer to- 
gether by lowering the spirit to a process of rea- 
soning he repudiates as rationalism, and the ef- 
fort to find some intellectual reconciliation of the 
irreconcilable he deals with as a futile presump- 
tion of metaphysics. Nevertheless, some sort of 
reconciliation the heart of man craves and will 
not, perhaps cannot, forgo; and the Platonic 
Ideas, as the dualist understands them, are pri- 
marily just the labour of the imagination to effect 
practically what could not be effected intellect- 
ually. We shall be in a better position to com- 
prehend this act of the imagination when we 
have analysed Plato's treatment of a very com- 
plex subject. 

The first and chief difficulty in the way of the 
interpreter is the obvious fact that Plato ap- 
proaches the doctrine of Ideas from many dif- 
ferent angles, and nowhere gives a final exposi- 
tion of his meaning. That was his lordly privi- 
lege; so much so that one is sometimes tempted 
to believe, with Schleiermacher, that he deliber- 
ately left these obstacles in the path of his dis- 
ciples in order that they might not be satisfied 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 165 

with the empty husks of word-knowledge, but 
should be kept aware of their ignorance until 
what they learned was illuminated by the light 
of their own inner experience. At any rate we 
should not fall into the error of smoothing away 
these obstacles by assuming a radical break in 
Plato's doctrine. That his attitude towards 
Ideas altered somewhat in the course of a long 
life may be granted; he would scarcely have 
been human if he had not suffered the changes of 
time. But to hold, as it has become rather the 
fashion nowadays, that at a certain moment in 
his career he repudiated one theory of Ideas and 
adopted a contrary theory, or even that the 
change in his views was anything more than the 
natural shifting of interest from one aspect of 
the question to another, is, I say flatly, to mis- 
conceive totally his philosophic history. The 
evidence for such a break is of the flimsiest sort 
and is contradicted by passages which can be ex- 
plained away only by doing violence to the text. 
If Plato appears inconsistent in his attitude 
towards Ideas it is because here, as in other 
cardinal points of his philosophy, he allows him- 
self a puzzling license in the matter of termino- 
logy.^ Sometimes the word "idea," or eidos^ is 
used quite as it might be heard in the market- 
place, meaning simply the "form" of an object, or 

^ It was a saying of the philosopher Didymus, as quoted 
by Stobaeus, that to 7ro\v<f><iivov tov nXarcDvos ov 7ro\vBo$ov. 



166 PLATONISM 

the "class" of objects grouped together more or 
less loosely by similarity of form; at other times 
it has a highly technical meaning as used in the 
schools; and it passes from one use to the other 
in such a way that on occasion we may have diffi- 
culty in determining its particular degree of 
technicality. But the most troublesome ambi- 
guity — an ambiguity which has caused the spill- 
ing of oceans of ink and of some blood — ^meets 
us when we are most sure that the usage is 
strictly technical. It is hard for the classifying 
philologue or the systematizing metaphysician to 
acquiesce in the fact that the Platonic Ideas fall 
under two quite different categories, correspond- 
ing to two different processes of the mind; and 
the maddening part of the truth is that Plato, 
though his whole philosophy hinges in a way on 
this distinction, will, when he pleases, write as if 
he were unaware of any such distinction. This 
sovereign indifference to our ease, I say, mad- 
dens the systematizer and may blind the modest 
inquirer; yet the faithful Platonist would scarce- 
ly wish it otherwise, since he is thus forced al- 
ways to remember the winged freedom of the 
spirit and the peril of scholastic pigeon-holes. 
What he might censure as ignorance or confusion 
in a lesser mind, he may tolerate as a not ignoble 
^^184^"' liberty in the proved seer. "A certain freedom 
in the use of words and phrases, with the avoid- 
ance of minute precision," Plato himself says, "is 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 167 

commonly allowed in a man who would not be 
pedantic; one even might call the contrary pro- 
cedure illiberal." 

The Ideas of Plato, then, fall under two main 
categories, which may be designated as the ra- 
tional and the ethical. The former category is 
itself not simple, but must be taken to embrace 
both mathematical forms (the discussion of which 
we shall leave to the following chapter on 
Science) and those intellectual generalizations 
from particular objects to the group which are 
commonly, but erroneously, thought of first in 
connection with the Platonic doctrine. This sec- 
ond division, embracing intellectual generaliza- 
tions, again falls into two subdivisions exempli- 
fied, respectively, by the Idea man which em- 
braces within itself the many individual men we 
see, and the Idea table which we have in our 
minds in connection with seeing and using many 
individual tables. In the one case the Idea is of 
a class of things in nature, and corresponds to 
the genus or species of modern science; in the 
other case it is of a class of manufactured ob- 
jects. In either case the term, without question, 
has a certain practical utility and answers to a 
certain process of experience: that is to say, in 
common parlance we have no difficulty in distin- 
guishing men as a group from any other group 
of animals, and tables from any other kind of 
furniture. The distinction is at least a prag- 



168 PLATONISM 

matical reality. Our miiids are not harassed by 
the fact that creatures may be found or imagined 
which shade by imperceptible degrees upwards 
into men and downwards into apes, or by the 
fact that articles may be made which could with 
equal propriety be called tables or desks or 
shelves ; for the ordinary concerns of life the dis- 
tinctions are plain and the terms sufficiently 
precise. 

But difficulties grow thick as soon as we begin 
to speculate. What is the nature of this Idea 
man or this Idea table which we have in our 
minds? Is it an entity apart from the individual 
objects, of which it is the pre-existent cause? 
And if so, how and where does it exist? Was it 
as an image in the mind of the Creator, or as a 
latent potentiality of impersonal energy, or as a 
pattern to which the Creator looked or which 
somehow controlled the impersonal energy? And 
how could there be a single stable image or po- 
tentiality or pattern of a group of individuals 
varying indefinitely in traits and merging in- 
sensibly into other groups? If there was a pre- 
existent Idea of men or tables, then why, by the 
same right, was there not an Idea of a certain 
class of men or tables, and then an Idea of a 
smaller group, and so on? Aristotle and other 
critics of Plato were not slow to bring out these 
difficulties. Of course we might say that it is 
just as easy to conceive the existence of an infi- 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 169 

nite number of Ideas as the existence of an in- 
finite number of material objects, but we balk at 
the infinitude of Ideas as a needless duplicating 
of our troubles. On the other hand, if we reject 
Ideas as previously existent entities, and hold 
them to be no more than words corresponding to 
generalizations of the human mind, are we not 
bound by such a theory to reject also any prin- 
ciple of purpose or teleology in the world? The 
notion of purpose or design, whether we regard 
the world as created or self-evolved, can scarcely 
be maintained unless an Idea of what is to be 
unfolded already in some manner exists. Either 
course leaves us with insoluble difficulties, and 
hence the long and imended debate between the 
metaphysicians of the realistic and the nominal- 
istic schools, between those who, in the mediaeval 
jargon, contended for universalia ante rem and 
those who contended for universalia post rem. 

In a general way it may be said that, with 
natural classes, such as men and animals, the dif- 
ficulties of the nominalistic view are seemingly 
the more insuperable, and that, in the slow re- 
turn of science and philosophy to a dependence 
on some sort of teleology in the process of evo- 
lution, we are forcing ourselves back into a be- 
lief in Ideas in something like the Platonic sense. 
But with a manufactured article, such as tables, 
the obstacles in the way of accepting the Idea 
still seem mountainous ; they loom up before the 



170 PLATONISM 

mind in the case of such an object because we 
see its conception and follow its construction as 
we do not in the case of natural groups. Some 
commentators, perceiving this difference in the 
difficulties, have urged that Plato held to Ideas 
of natural classes, but never, or only at an early 
stage of his mental development, believed in 
Ideas of manufactured articles. That is an old 
way with commentators, to strain at a gnat and 
swallow the camel. In reality the difference is 
apparent only and superficial, and it is just as 
easy to hypostatize one kind of generalization as 
the other. It ought to be perfectly clear from 
the tenth book of The Republic, if from no other 
passage, that Plato in his maturity held equally 
to both kinds of Ideas. It ought to be clear also 
that he spoke of Ideas as of entities anterior to 
individual objects and having an existence out- 
side of the generalizing mind of man. To doubt 
this is to deny the plain sense of innumerable 
passages in his works and is to flout the common 
sense of many generations of readers. 

So far the way of the interpreter is fairly clear 
and straightforward. He has simply to admit 
that Plato taught the reality of generalizations 
as pre-existent entities without attempting to 
explain the nature of their existence. In very 
sooth, there would appear to be no answer to 
such a question, and Plato was wise and honest 
enough not to stultify himself by trying to forge 
one. 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 171 

He was saved from this intellectual stultifica- 
tion partly by his loyalty to the Socratic scepti- 
cism, and partly also, it may be, by the fact that 
his main interest lay not in these Ideas that cor- 
respond to generalizations from the similarity of 
objects of perception (nor even in those other 
rational Ideas, corresponding to mathematical 
forms, which are yet to be considered), but in 
Ideas (he employed the same word for both 
kinds) of a totally different origin. It is hard to 
see how any one can read the Dialogues without 
being impressed by the fact that Plato was 
brought to his doctrine of Ideas by ethical rather 
than logical considerations, and that to the end, 
despite what may be called his period of meta- 
physical stress, his chief interest lay in this di- 
rection. The clue to his motives is given in the 
closing paragraphs of the fifth book of The Re- 
public, where he is introducing his great argu- 
ment on the place of Ideas in the philosophical 
and political life. What shall be our reply, he 
says, to the good fellow who is quite ready to ad- 
mit the existence of beautiful things, but who 
laughs at us when we speak of the absolute un- 
changeable Idea of beauty as really and eternal- 
ly existent apart from these particular things? 
Shall we not ask him to name any particular 
beautiful thing which on occasion may not ap- 
pear ugly, or any just or holy act, so-called, 
which may not under other circumstances appear 



172 PLATONISM 

unjust and unholy? And so with other things 
we regard as great or small, heavy or light, and 
the like. No, the simple truth is that the popular 
ascription of beauty and the like is concerned 
with things that are tossing about in some mid- 
region between pure being and not-being; beauty 
and justice so taken furnish no hold on know- 
ledge, neither can they be utterly ignored, but 
are matters of opinion only, a state of mind as 
shifting and uncertain as themselves. And as 
men use these words so will their hearts be. If 
a man admits the reahty of beauty and justice as 
eternal Ideas he will love beauty and justice and 
embrace them as things he can know and depend 
upon; he will be a lover of such knowledge, a 
philosopher. But if he sees only a mutable world 
of things now fair and just, now ugly and un- 
just, he will perforce be content with this sort of 
uncertainty and will not endure to hear of fixed 
laws of beauty and justice. There is nothing for 
him really to know, no knowledge for him to 
love ; he will not be a philosopher, but a lover of 
opinion, a philodoccer. 

Now pretty much all of Plato's theory is in 
this passage, which I have given in somewhat 
condensed form, and it will repay minute study. 
In the first place it will be observed that the 
Ideas of great and small, corresponding to gen- 
eralizations derived from the similarity of ob- 
jects of perception, are thrown in among the 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 173 

Ideas of beauty and justice, as if all Ideas were 
of the same order. But their inclusion, it will 
also be observed, is merely casual, and they drop 
out of consideration when the value of Ideas is 
discussed and the necessity of their existence is 
maintained. This is in accordance with the com- 
mon habit of Plato, to name together groups of 
intellectual and of ethical Ideas as if the argu- 
ment was concerned with them indiscriminately, 
and then quietly to drop one or the other group. 
It is not the only case where he is content to draw 
tacitly, perhaps unconsciously, a distinction of 
prime importance to his philosophy. 

It will be further observed that all through 
this argument, and indeed repeatedly in other 
Dialogues, Plato couples beauty with justice, or 
with goodness, as if they belonged to the same 
category ; and in this case he does not name them 
together, merely to drop one of the classes, as he 
does when he includes intellectual generalizations 
with them, but maintains the union intimately to 
the end. There is here, then, a real refusal, or 
failure, to discriminate between aesthetics and 
ethics in the Ideal sphere. This, however, does 
not mean that he identified beauty and goodness 
through all their course, for there were many 
manifestations of beauty which he condemned as 
inimical to goodness; and it decidedly does not 
mean, as the Paterians would have us believe, 
that his primary interest was in the beautiful. 



174 PLATONISM 

Laws 727d foF of such aesthctcs he can on occasion speak 
with utter scorn. The explanation is, rather, 
that he made a distinction between Ideal beauty 
and the actual manifestations of beauty. 

Only once, in the Hippias Major, did Plato 
undertake to deal with the beautiful from a 
purely aesthetic point of view, and here the near- 
est approach to a definition, after many trials, is 
299b that beauty might be called "pleasure through 
sight and hearing." This definition, indeed, he 
finally rejects, because it does no more than de- 
scribe the effect upon us of beautiful objects, 
whereas the beautiful itself, for which he is look- 
ing, would be the cause that brings together into 
a common category all the objects that so affect 
us. Yet it may stand as Plato's working defini- 
tion of the beautiful, and fits in with his constant 
association of practical aesthetics and hedonism, 
the desire of beauty with the desire of pleasure. 
Beautiful objects as such are merely one division 
of things that give us pleasure, and are to be em- 
braced or renounced, like all such things, not by a 
standard of immediate intensity but by a wider 
calculation of the kind of pleasure given. Other 
things being equal, the more beautiful object is 
preferable to the less beautiful, just as generally 
the intenser pleasure of the moment is prefer- 
able to the less intense. But "other things" are 
by no means always equal; the larger consider- 
ation of life may command us to condemn a par- 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 175 

ticular manifestation of beauty, as it may bid us 
reject any other appeal to the senses, and above 
this falHble principle of hedonism is the moral 
law, with its power of inhibition upon the impulse 
of all desires. Hence it follows that art cannot 
be left to work under the canons of beauty alone, 
independently of outside control, but is to be 
judged by a standard embracing interests of a 
far wider order ; art must be subservient to ethics. 
In The Republic Plato, himself the master art- 
ist, shuts out of his ideal city poets and artists of 
high renown, men of whom he may elsewhere 
speak in the language of reverence, because the 
pleasure derived from their craft seems to his 
austere judgment contrary to the goal of happi- 
ness towards which he is straining. It is even 
true that he is wont to look with a touch of sus- 
picion on art in itself, just as sometimes he is 
hurried by zeal, against his better judgment, to 
denounce pleasure in itself. He seems at these 
moments to feel that the tendency of art is al- 
most inevitably to strengthen the immediate sen- 
sations against the inner check, and that there is 
an ancient irreconcilable feud between philo- ibid. 607b 
sophy and poetry. This, however, is Plato 
troubled in spirit by too pressing a vision of the 
perils and misfortunes of life; in his calmer 
moods he recognizes the great function of art and 
poetry in education, and throughout the Laws 
there are passages on this topic replete with 
sound and subtle observation. 



Republic 604d 
606a,d 



176 PLATONISM 

But it is not my intention in this volume of 
introductory studies to enter into the compHcated 
task of imraveUing Plato's aesthetics, further 
than to show how and why that question is in- 
volved in the question of his ethics. In brief, the 
practice of art, as he saw it, is parallel with the 
practice of the virtues, but distinguished by the 
kind of pleasure evoked. When, however, we 
pass to the Idea behind the manifestations of 
beauty we are in the region of happiness, just as 
when we pass from considering the virtues to the 
moral force above them. And as happiness ad- 
mits no distinction in kind, so the Idea of beauty 
merges into that of goodness. Hence there is no 
confusion, granted Plato's general point of view, 
as every true Platonist is ready to grant, in his 
method of dealing simultaneously with aesthetic 
and ethical Ideas. 

But there is still another distinction to be 
made. (I trust the reader's patience is not ex- 
hausted; I sometimes fancy that the best defini- 
tion of a Platonist would be "a lover of distinc- 
tions.") In the passage of the fifth book of The 
Republic to which we are referring, just before 
476a the paragraphs actually quoted, Plato speaks of 
the Ideas of justice and injustice, good and evil, 
each of which is one by itself, but by participa- 
tion in acts and bodies and by communion one 
with another, has the appearance of being many. 
Now the point with which we are concerned is 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 177 

the inclusion of these Ideas of evil and ugliness 
(the latter, Ideas of ugliness, are not mentioned 
here, but they are so included in other passages 
of similar import) with those of goodness and 
beauty. Is the philosopher, then, as a lover of 
Ideas, one who loves ugliness and injustice by 
the same token that he loves beauty and jus- 
tice? The answer to this question is implicit in 
the fact that here, as elsewhere, when Plato 
comes to draw his conclusions and apply his 
moral, he silently drops these so-to-speak reverse 
Ideas of ugliness and injustice out of considera- 
tion and argues as if he had named only beauty 
and justice. The Ideas of ugliness and injustice 
are not properly ethical — precisely as it is not 
ethical to be ugly or unjust — but are of the na- 
ture of intellectual generalizations ; they are, like 
other intellectual Ideas, listed with the ethical, 
and then, in like manner, tacitly ignored when 
the moral application is made. 

It is clear, then, that in discussing Plato's doc- 
trine of Ideas we have to deal with a very com- 
plex question. First of all we must set apart 
notions derived from the similarity perceived in 
a group of objects or from quantitative relations. 
With these must be placed also those aesthetic 
and ethical notions which are equally derived by 
generalizing from observation, and which include 
ugliness as well as beauty, unrighteousness as 
well as righteousness. All these are Ideas in a 



178 PLATONISM 

way and have their own reahty ; but they are in- 
tellectual in their origin and pertain to the scien- 
tific rather than to the philosophic life. The dif- 
ference lies in this, that in the procedure of 
science we are interested in acquiring a know- 
ledge of the Ideas, whereas in the procedure of 
philosophy we are interested in possessing the 
Ideas themselves. Ideas, as Plato was supremely 
concerned in them, and as they constitute the 
essence of what the world has rightly known as 
Platonism, are not derived intellectually, but are 
an emphatic assertion of the unchanging reality 
behind moral forces, a natural development of 
the Socratic affirmation of spiritual truth. 

We can now understand why Plato saw in the 
rejection or acceptance of Ideas the line dividing 
men into two hostile camps. He had in mind one 
of the commonplace distinctions with which we 
are perfectly familiar today as were the people 
of Athens in his day, and which is fraught with 
far-reaching consequences. We are all acquaint- 
ed with the man who, having a current know- 
ledge of history and the world, insists fluently 
that there is no fixed standard of beauty or jus- 
tice, and who overwhelms us with illustrations 
to prove that everything regarded as beautiful or 
just by one people and at one age is to another 
people or at another age the very reverse of 
beautiful or just. Plato would admit that such 
men, if the debate is kept within the bounds they 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 179 

prescribe, are entirely right ; there is nothing ab- 
solutely fixed in particulars, and no knowledge 
of what is not fixed. But he would add that this 
is only the lower side of the truth. The fact that 
all peoples and all ages have some word, more or 
less precise, for the beautiful and the just, and 
have the same motions in their souls towards that 
which they call by these words, shows that some 
constant force is at work through all the variety 
of its manifestations. The objects and acts that 
appeal to an Australian head-hunter as beauti- 
ful and right may in some respects be quite the 
contrary of what would receive the approbation 
of a Christian bishop; but beauty and justice, or 
rightness, have the same place and function in 
the soul of the one as of the other. These, Plato 
would say, are the absolute Ideas which both 
head-hunter and bishop know, whereas in the ap- 
plication of these Ideas to particular objects and 
acts they fall into the region of opinion. Such, 
he would contend, is the fact, no matter whether 
you acknowledge it or not ; but he would add that 
it matters a great deal to you personally whether 
you acknowledge it. If you admit the reality of 
the Idea of justice, you will love the Idea, and 
your love will be established upon something 
fixed; you will not only be confirmed in your 
readiness to act in accordance with the principles 
of justice as these are formulated by your own 
experience and by that of the society in which 



180 PLATONISM 

you live (whence all the practical virtues), but 
you will be led to search deeply into your con- 
sciousness for principles that approach more 
nearly to the absolute standard and authority of 
an Idea. You will be a promoter of your own 
welfare and of society's, a guide and governor 
among men who are groping towards wisdom, a 
philosopher. On the other hand, if you reject the 
Idea of justice and say there is nothing fixed and 
unalterable behind the changing fashions of law 
and custom, nothing at once the cause and goal 
of these fashions, if you say that justice is merely 
a name for acts which may have nothing in com- 
mon, you are taking away all that gives to justice 
a firm hold upon the human heart. You will 
scarcely retain any deep love for what is only a 
name; you may conform to the popular rules of 
justice from habit or for prudential reasons, but, 
really, one may well be slow in trusting you very 
far out of sight, or in placing much reliance on 
your character — indeed, one may ask whether, 
properly speaking, you have such a thing as a 
character. If what is just to-day was unjust 
yesterday and may be unjust to-morrow, and 
there is nothing behind these changes, one can't 
see why you shouldn't change, at your own con- 
venience, without waiting for the slower-moving 
opinions of society. And certainly, supposing 
you are a lover of anything besides yourself, one 
cannot think of you as a philosopher, but, if you 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 181 

will pardon a rather ugly-sounding word, as a 
philodoxer. 

These Ideas, then, which play so important a 
role in Plato's philosophy and have for these 
thousands of years haunted the world as impal- 
pable embodiments of truth, are primarily ethi- 
cal in their nature ; and we have this pragmatic 
proof of their existence, that without them we 
can discover no sound basis of morality. They 
are, in fact, the very reahties of our spiritual Hf e, 
in comparison with which all the sohd-seeming 
phenomena of earth are things evanescent and 
unreal. But in what does their reahty subsist? 
What are they in themselves? To answer this 
question we must go back to the psychological 
analysis of morality. 

The central truth of dualism is a recognition of 
the absolute distinction between the two elements 
of our conscious being and an admission of the 
impossibility of finding any rationally positive 
explanation of the mutual interaction of these 
two elements. We know that our concupiscent 
soul is, or ought to be, under the jurisdiction of 
the spirit, yet our analytic reason can express 
this jurisdiction only in terms of suspension and 
an inner check. But the human mind cannot rest 
comfortably in this state of mere negation; it is 
impelled by its very nature to seek some positive 
expression for these superrational facts of con- 
sciousness, and it is just here that another fac- 



182 PLATONISM 

ulty, the imagination, steps in to perform what 
was impossible to the reason. In its lower ac- 
tivity the imagination is the power by which the 
sensations derived through the organs of sight 
and the rest are projected outside of the mind as 
objects of perception. The imagination can also 
go beyond this function and, after recombining 
at pleasure the data of perception, can project 
these new combinations into the void as things 
having to the mind a certain degree of in- 
dependent existence. Thus, the landscape con- 
ceived by the artist or the character conceived 
by the poet is thrown out into the world of ob- 
jective existences. And so, by a still higher ac- 
tivity, the imagination essays to deal with the 
immediate data of consciousness, as it deals with 
those of sensation. Justice, which to the reason 
was only a negation of our positive impulses, is, 
like the creation of the artist, projected outside 
of the soul so as to become a positive entity with 
a life and habitation of its own, and the soul un- 
der control of moral force seems itself to be reach- 
ing out to touch and take into its possession that 
which is, in a way, its own creation. 

These imaginative projections of the facts of 
moral consciousness are the true Platonic ideas. 
Hence their peculiarity: though the most inti- 
mate realities of experience, things of which our 
knowledge is so firm and sure that of other things 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 183 

we seem in comparison to have only opinion, yet 
the moment we apply our discursive reason to 
them, the moment we imdertake to describe them 
in intellectual terms, they melt away into noth- 
ingness, like the dew in the clear dry breath of 
the morning. Hence, too, the varying terms 
which Plato gives to their operation. They are 
always, as products of the imagination, objective 
entities, separate (chdrista) from the world of 
phenomena and from the soul itself, but at one 
time he may speak of them as patterns {para- 
deigmata), laid up in heaven or in some unde- 
fined region, to which we look as models to mould 
our conduct by, or, at another time, he may speak 
of them as visitants to the soul, neither exactly 
corporeal nor yet incorporeal, by whose presence sophist 247a 
(parousia) we possess the qualities of which they 
are the substance, or, more vaguely still, as mere 
forces (dynameis) that play upon us and make md. 247e 
us what we are. The looseness of Plato's termin- 
ology would indicate that, to him at least, it is 
of relatively slight importance how we take them 
to be, so long as we accept their being and bow 
to their authority. The point of supreme im- 
portance for the Platonizer today is, not that he 
should be able to define the operation of Ideas, 
but that he should avoid the two contrary errors 
of the rationalist and the romanticist. 

On the one hand the literature of philosophy 
is replete with the ghastly failures of the ration- 



184 PLATONISM 

alist, who, perceiving the illogical nature of these 
forms, has either rejected them and their author 
altogether in the name of reason, or, by attempt- 
ing some intellectual "reconciliation," has re- 
duced them to mere nominalistic categories of the 
reason and so emptied them of all vital signifi- 
cance. This denial of the office of the imagina- 
tion is particularly the error of metaphysics, of 
which we shall have more to say in our discussion 
of the Parmenides. 

But the other error is equally wide-spread and 
even more lethal in its consequences. I mean the 
error of the romanticist who sees clearly enough 
that Ideas are the creation of the image-making 
faculty, but treats them as if they were somehow 
created by a purely spontaneous power eoo nihilo, 
and so deprives them of eternal and authorita- 
tive validity. This is peculiarly the fault of the 
self-styled Platonists of modern times, but it may 
be traced back to the beginnings of romanticism, 
if not to the ancient school of Neoplatonists. 
Hegel laid his finger on one of its manifestations 
in his criticism of romantic irony: "It was 
Friedrich von Schlegel who first brought forward 
this idea, and Ast repeated it, saying, 'The most 
ardent love of all beauty in the Idea, as in life, 
inspires Socrates' words with inward, unfathom- 
able life.' This life is now said to be irony! But 
this irony issues from the Fichtean philosophy, 
and is an essential point in the comprehension of 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 185 

the conceptions of most recent times. It is when 
subjective consciousness maintains its independ- 
ence of everything, that it says, *It is I who 
through my educated thoughts can annul all de- 
terminations of right, morality, good, &c., be- 
cause I am clearly master of them, and I know 
that if anything seems good to me I can easily 
subvert it, because things are only true to me in 
so far as they please me now.' This irony is thus 
only a trifling with everything, and it can trans- 
form all things into show: to this subjectivity 
nothing is any longer serious."^ But the evil has 
persisted in romantic writers who are serious 
enough in their way. It is not the misuse of So- 
cratic irony, but a more subtle perversion of Pla- 
tonic truth, which one will find, for instance, in 
such a writer as Professor Santayana, when he 
maintains that "religion and poetry are identical 
in essence, and differ merely in the way in which 
they are attached to practical affairs." By this 
he would argue, if I understand his drift, that 
the ideal world is a purely spontaneous evoca- 
tion, and as in poetry every man is free to create 
what images he will, so it is in religion. "The 
impassioned soul," he says, "must pass beyond 
the understanding, or else go unsatisfied ; and un- 
less it be as disciplined as it is impassioned it will 
not tolerate dissatisfaction. From what quarter, 

^ History of Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane^ I, 
400. 



186 PLATONISM 

then, will it draw the wider views, the deeper har- 
monies, which it craves? Only from the imagi- 
nation. There is no other faculty left to invoke. 
The imagination, therefore, must furnish to re- 
ligion and to metaphysics those large ideas tinc- 
tured with passion, those supersensible forms 
shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great 
sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects." 
But these Ideas are of the nature of things that 
cannot be verified. "Faith and the higher reason 
of the metaphysician are therefore forms of 
imagination believed to be avenues to truth, as 
dreams or oracles may sometimes be truthful, not 
because their necessary correspondence to truth 
can be demonstrated, for then they would be por- 
tions of science [that is, of what is known, in 
contrast with Ideas which would be matters of 
opinion], but because a man dwelling on those 
intuitions is conscious of a certain moral trans- 
formation, of a certain warmth and energy of 
life."^ Now there is much in all this that seems 
to have the ring of true Platonism, but on closer 
investigation it will prove to indicate an attitude 
towards things of the spirit which Plato would 
have met with scorn and denial. Plato would 
not say precisely with S ant ay ana (we take him 
as typical of romantic Platonism) that the 
imagination furnishes to religion those large 
Ideas in which alone a great mind feels itself at 

^ Poetry and Religion, pp. v, 6, 8. 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 187 

home, but rather that the imagination gives vi- 
tality to the moral facts which are furnished it 
by religion. And Plato would have utterly de- 
nied that the correspondence of Ideas with truth 
cannot be demonstrated; on the contrary he 
would have asserted that the work of the imagi- 
nation, unless it answers in the fullest measure 
to known truth, is not an Idea at all. Ideas are 
the product of the imagination, but of the imagi- 
nation working upon material given to it by the 
immutable law of moraUty; the truth is present 
to our consciousness before this act of transfor- 
mation, and has no more authority, though it 
may be clothed with more persuasion, after it 
has been evoked for the inner eye as a form than 
it had previously to that evocation. 

I may seem to have dwelt overlong on this 
perversion, but the right use of the imagination 
is of the very essence of Ideahsm. It is true that 
the power of the Platonic philosophy over the 
minds and hearts of men is attributable in large 
measure to its insistence on the immediate vision 
of moral forces as Ideal entities ; but it behooves 
the Platonist to remember also that the imagina- 
tion is the most treacherous and headstrong of 
all oiu* faculties if once it is permitted to slip the 
leash of moral control. The romantic spontan- 
eity, which lures the imagination with a promise 
of irresponsibiUty in creating its moral and re- 
ligious Ideas, is a meretricious parody of Platon- 



188 



PLATONISM 



Republic 49 7d 



Republic 507e 



Symposium 
219a 



ism; its end is a bitter disillusion in the reality of 
misery. Alas that, surveying the many flatteries 
addressed to the soul under the guise of idealism, 
we must say in words that were so often in the 
mouth of Plato himself: How difficult are all 
things fair! how treacherous the desire of them! 
Such is the function, such are the limitations, 
of that activity of the soul which produces the 
Platonic Ideas. The name "imagination," I 
need scarcely add, does not itself occur in Plato, 
as indeed there is no word in classical Greek quite 
corresponding to its connotation; but I have not 
scrupled to apply our modern term to the process 
by which the ethical facts of consciousness are not 
only projected outside of the soul as independ- 
ent entities, but are represented as images in 
some way visible. Vision, Plato observes, is the 
noblest of our perceptions, the sense that seems 
to bring us into closest intimacy with the objects 
of the phenomenal world ; hence it is natural that, 
in the groping language of symbolism, our know- 
ledge of Ideas should come to the soul by a spirit- 
ual organ similar in its operation to that of the 
physical eye. We see Ideas, Plato says, by the 
inner eye, "the vision of the understanding" — 
which is his nearest approach to a technical term 
for the faculty of the imagination regarded as a 
passive instrument. In the sixth book of The 
Republic (following the conclusion of the fifth 
book to which we have already referred) he 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 189 

elaborates the metaphor in detail, comparing the 
ethical Ideas in the soul with the models which 
an artist studies in the work of imitation. He is 
even so deeply convinced of the value of this 
similitude as to carry it beyond the mere usage 
of rhetoric into the region of mythology, as is his 
wont in matters that transcend the reach of ra- 
tional definition. For is it, he would seem to ask, 
after all only metaphor? Does our imagination, 
as we think in our cooler moods, really create 
these Ideas as phantoms of its own evocation, or 
may it be that they are in fact bodied forms that 
show themselves to us in our moments of exalta- 
tion, creatures like to the gods who have their 
home on Olympus, yet at their own choice may 
be revealed to us in dreams or the more blessed 
hours of waking, recognized, for the dulness of 
our senses, only as they fade away into the air : 

"By his pace in leaving us I knew. 
Without all question, 'twas a God; the Gods are 
easily known." ^ 

And so we have the entrancing fable of the 
Phaedrus, wherein the Ideas are no longer de- 
scribed vaguely as images floating before the 
soul, but as shining realities, existing for ever in 
their own light beyond the confines of the high- 
est heaven. Thither the soul, when purified of 
her mortal passions, drives in her winged car 

^ Iliad xii, 70, Chapman's translation. 



190 PLATONISM 

with the lordly procession of the gods, and, reach- 
ing the apex of the skies, for the time of a celes- 
tial revolution looks out into those unearthly- 
spaces, and beholds there the divine spectacle of 
justice itself and temperance itself, even know- 
ledge itself, not as these things are guessed at in 
the shifting and uncertain phenomena descried 
by the purblind eyes of the body, but in their 
everlasting veracity and glory. That is the great 
and joyous feast of the soul — the eucharist of the 
philosopher, whereat he partakes of the eternal 
substance, and is made aware of his spiritual 
kinship with the gods. Is the fable a delusion, 
a mere hunger of the brain, the consolation of an 
innocent make-believe? How far, in other 
words, was Plato consciously turning his psy- 
chology into allegory, and how far did he regard 
his mythical account of Ideas as the shadow of 
an immortal revelation? I for one would not 
care to say, holding that it is of the very essence 
of Platonism to leave these high matters in their 
own evasive liberty; but I know that Emerson 
wrote from the same true experience of the soul 
in his chapter on Illusions: 

"There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the 
universe. All is system and gradation. Every god 
is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal 
enters the hall of the firmament ; there is he alone 
with them alone, they pouring on him benedic- 
tions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 191 

thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall 
snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in 
a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and 
whose movement and doings he must obey: he 
fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. 
The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now 
furiously commanding this thing to be done, now 
that. What is he that he should resist their will, 
and think or act for himself? Every moment, 
new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to 
baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, 
for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts 
a little, there are the gods still sitting around him 
on their thrones — they alone with him alone." 

And as the Platonic vision unrolls in a mythi- 
cal space that is not the expansion of this world, 
so it falls in a time that is not measured by the 
interval between a man's birth and dying. The 
same magic of the imagination which placed the 
adventure of the soul in a region beyond the ut- 
termost sphere of the heavens carries the event 
back to a remote age, to a Hf e before the begin- 
ning of these terrestrial days. Our knowledge of 
Ideas, which now is of things at once visible and 
invisible, becomes by this act as it were a dim 
and transient memory of what the soul did verit- 
ably behold, face to face, in some prenatal exist- 
ence. This is the meaning of metempsychosis 
and "reminiscence" as they are taught in the 
Meno and elsewhere, the setting in a mythical 



192 PLATONISM 

time and space of an experience which, philo- 
sophically considered, belongs to neither; for the 
Ideas, though known in time, are eternal, and 
though seen by the eye of the spirit, are not to be 
found among the phenomena that fill the bound- 
aries of physical space. They are as the gods 
sitting on their unshakable thrones, seen through 
the drifting snow-storms of illusions. 

He in whom the memory of this great adven- 
ture stirs is filled with longing to join the gods 
once again in their upward procession within the 
vault of the sky. So haunting is the recollection 
of his joy that in comparison with it all other 
satisfactions dwindle to worthless make-believe. 
Hence the theory of an Uranian love that carries 
the desires of the soul upwards to the participa- 
tion in Ideas, like, yet very unlike, the common, 
or Pandemic, love that craves the pleasure of 
earthly possessions. In the greatest of the myth- 
ological Dialogues, the Symposium, Socrates 
tells a pretty tale which he pretends to have heard 
from the lips of an inspired woman of Mantinea. 
Love, he says, is not a god, neither is he a mortal, 
but a mighty daemon, begotten of the divine 
Poros, or Abundance, and conceived of the mor- 
tal Penia, or Penury, whose office it is to act as 
a mediator between gods and men. He it is that 
creates in us "the thirst that from the soul doth 
rise," the insatiable longings for wisdom, which 
is the most beautiful of all things. Such a desire 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 193 

is not known to the gods, for beauty and goodness 
in perfection are already theirs, and desire is only 
of that which is not possessed. Neither is it felt 
by the ignorant among men, for this is the very 
evil of ignorance that he who has no part in 
beauty or goodness or wisdom should yet be con- 
tent with his lot; feeling no want, he has no de- 
sire. Love, the Uranian love, is philosophy ; and 
the true philosopher is he who, having in memory 
the vision of the celestial images, possessing 
them yet not possessing them, feels the whole 
current of his being turned to the one supernatu- 
ral desire to snatch them out of the shadowy past 
and make them the present palpable realities of 
his life. Every act, every wish, every thought, 
should be the perfect imitation, rather the com- 
plete embodiment, of an Idea. Imagination is 
not an empty dream, not a vacant and wander- 
ing liberty, but the master of things as they are 
and the moulder of his will. 

It is this emotional element that distinguishes 
the Platonic philosophy from the other schools, 
and has made it an undying force in the practical 
world; and this emotional element must be re- 
garded, I think, as the indispensable servant of 
truth, if philosophy is to be a life and not an idle 
disputation. But I dare not say that it has 
passed into wide acceptance without bringing 
grave perils in its train. Plato himself may have 
taken great pains to discriminate theoretically 



194 PLATONISM 

between the love of ideal beauty, which is akin to 
the love of endurance and temperance and wis- 
dom and all the chorus of the virtues, and the 
other love which is not ideal at all, but a license 
of the imagination or a lust of the flesh; but it 
needs a strong man to maintain such a distinc- 
tion, when all the powers of the world, together 
with the subtler power of self-love, make for con- 
fusion. It is thus not without reason that Pla- 
tonic love has often passed into a jest, and some- 
times into a reproach. Nor can Plato for this be 
held entirely guiltless. There are passages of 
the Symposium, and more particularly of the 
Phaedrus, in which the passionate colour of his 
language so envelops the allurement of particu- 
lar objects that some effort of the mind is re- 
quired to remember the ideal beauty of which 
they are supposed to be the manifestations. The 
danger is heightened when he speaks with curious 
lack of indignation of pleasures which the world 
has agreed to hold unnatural and to reject with 
instinctive abomination. Yet in these few iso- 
lated passages where the attraction of sensuous 
beauty seems for the moment to have veiled his 
purer ethical vision, we do him a great wrong if 
we fail to remember that it is a passing cloud 
before the sun of the soul, not an eclipse. We 
need then to turn to the strange confession of 
Alcibiades at the close of the Symposium, and to 
learn again how rigidly beauty and all the seduc- 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 195 

tions of pleasure were held in subjection to the 
refraining will. The Socrates of Plato may have 
portrayed himself playfully as a slave to any Theages usb 
beautiful body and as wise only in erotic lore; Ti6d "™ 
when it came to the test of action he could master 
the lawless impulses of the flesh unflinchingly 
and, as it seems, without a pang of regret. 
Those who dwelt with him and understood his 
manner of speech knew well enough that all his 
babble about the pursuit of beautiful bodies was 
but a veil of irony thrown before the hunger of 
his soul for fulfilment of its unearthly love. 

The ideal world, created or, it may be, ob- 
scurely grasped by the imagination, is thus at 
once an illusion and a reality, with this differ- 
ence, that when we deal with philosophy as a 
mere dead corpus of speculation these Ideas fade 
away into an illusory make-believe, whereas such 
is the constitution of our spiritual nature that the 
more we take philosophy as a principle of life 
the more vivid and real do they become. That is 
a truth which can be demonstrated only by liv- 
ing, not by argument. But of the facts of ethi- 
cal experience underlying the Ideas there is no 
such halting tale, no question at all of make- 
believe. Here we have not to do with the meta- 
phorical "eye of the understanding," but with 
that form of progressive knowledge, rather with 
the only immediate and veritable knowledge, 
which Plato designated as dialectic — ^that is, the 



196 PLATONISM 

philosophy of the soul discoursing with herself of 
the pure intuitions of consciousness, and so pass- 
ing ever upwards to larger and more comprehen- 
sive truth. The parallel processes of that ascent, 
dialectical and ideal, may be described somewhat 
as follows. Let us suppose that a certain plea- 
sure is presented to a man. His natural desire 
is forthwith to reach out for this pleasure ; but he 
is made to pause. This power of suspension, 
which to Locke was the substitute for the free 
will, and which I have termed the inner check 
or, more precisely in the language of Plato, the 
daemonic opposition, intervenes between desire 
and the reaching out for fulfilment. The man 
has time to calculate from experience or precept, 
half unwittingly it may be, whether it will be bet- 
ter to grant himself this pleasure or to forgo it. 
The result of this act of suspension, whether it 
end in permission or negation, and whether the 
judgment of ultimate pleasure and pain be right 
or wrong, is the virtue of temperance, and with 
it comes the feeling of happiness. That is the 
dialectical certainty, what we know by immedi- 
ate and incontrovertible evidence. But with 
this certainty there rises before the man's imagi- 
nation, if he reflects on his state, the Idea of 
temperance as a visible power or presence, so al- 
luring in itself that beside it the object of his 
physical desire appears mean and ephemeral. If 
his judgment was led to veto that desire, it will 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 197 

seem to him that his act of restraint was merely 
the choice in its place of this more desirable 
image; the love of the Idea has driven out the 
baser love of the flesh. If his judgment granted 
the desire as good, then it will seem to him as if 
this desired object were indeed beautiful, but 
beautiful only as a shadow or receptacle of the 
overflowing loveliness of the Idea. 

Now suppose this event of the soul, if I may 
so call it, is followed, as in life it will be, by other 
events in which various desires more or less simi- 
lar in nature are involved. Out of the grouping 
of these events will arise a larger experience of 
the happiness invariably attendant on the inhibit- 
ing power and a clearer consciousness of this 
power itself as the determining element of the 
soul's true welfare. We grow thereby in dialec- 
tical knowledge. And with this growth there fol- 
lows a like enlargement of the ethical imagina- 
tion. The Idea of temperance comes to embrace 
more details and fuller reality, and to show on its 
face a more radiant charm ; and as our love of the 
Idea is enhanced, the desire of any particular 
pleasure dwindles in comparison. With larger 
dialectical knowledge the Idea of temperance is 
taken up into a more comprehensive form, into 
the Idea of fortitude, it may be, as the soul's vir- 
tue of resistance to all temptations, whether of 
desire or of aversion, hope or fear; and this Idea 
again may be carried up into the still larger Idea 



198 PLATONISM 

of wisdom, and ever onward to the supreme Idea 
of the Good. 
Symposium And SO, as it were by the steps of an ascending 
stairway, we have reached the summit of Plato's 
dialectic and of human experience, to that Idea 
of the Good which to the practical mind of the 
writer of the Moralia Magna seemed a fantastic 
unreality, but to the inward-looking eye of the 
soul is the one supreme reality. It is not to be 
wondered at that certain of Plato's contempo- 
raries were made dizzy by the attempt to gaze 
directly at this luminary of truth, as the eye of 
the body is blinded by meeting the unveiled radi- 
ance of the sun, or that tradition should have soon 
gathered strange tales about the lectures in which 
he unfolded his theories.^ Plato himself virtu- 
Repubiic 506d ally admitted that no definition of the Good was 
possible, since there is nothing beyond it from 
which further light could be obtained, and there 
is no way of explaining why we desire that which 
is the end of all desiring. The only device for 
turning the eye of the soul thitherward is not by 
endeavouring to define the undefinable, but by 
pointing out the direction to be taken by those 
who would approach it; as Plato has done sym- 
^BrJIr bolically in the wonderful allegory of the cave, 
and, more analytically, in the discussion, follow- 
ing this allegory, of the propaedeutic training in 

^ For example, the often-quoted story of Aristoxenus, 
Elements of Harmony ii, 30. 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 199 

abstract thought.^ It is possible that in the lec- 
tures devoted to this preliminary training Plato 
may have been careless in his use of terms, but 
two things are certain: the alleged confusion of 
his mathematical with his ethical Ideas, on which 
Aristotle laid so much stress, is, as we shall see 
in our study of Plato's science, a disastrous mis- 
imderstanding of his method; and the tradition 
of an esoteric doctrine, as distinct from the sup- 
posedly popular exposition of his philosophy in 
the Dialogues, has not the slightest foundation 
in fact. The Dialogues, as we have them, carry 
the mind as far as it can go, further than most 
minds are willing to follow, and the notion of a 
secret truth still beyond is merely the hugger- 
muggery of an age which was losing its power to 
discriminate between thinking and wishing to 
think. What, in the name of intelligence, should 
that mystical doctrine be? If there were no other 
damning evidence, the silly allusions to this enig- 
matic teaching and the statement that Plato 
never had written and never would write down 
his true principles are sufficient to prove the so- 
called Platonic Epistles a forgery."^ 

^ The scholium to Gorgias 506c puts the case well: 
"For the Good, as the end, is in itself undefinable. Where- 
fore it is here set forth by means of negation of what it 
seems to be, as for instance that it is not pleasure." And so 
on of its treatment in other Dialogues. 

'^ Ch. Huit, La Vie et Voeuvre de Platon, 1, chap, v, §§ 7 
and 8 (the two sections by an oversight are both numbered 



200 PLATONISM 

But if we cannot define the supreme Idea — 
since it is the ethical fact which must be used to 
give meaning to all our ethical definitions — at 
least we can look at it, as Plato did, from differ- 
ent points of view. What it is not we can say 
^^^505bc with assurance. It is not pleasure, since pleas- 
ures may be relatively either good or bad. 
Neither is it knowledge, in the ordinary sense of 
the word, since those finer wits who would so de- 
fine it are obliged in the end to say "knowledge 
of the Good." How, then, shall we approach it 
positively? 

When we see the supreme Idea, or seem to see 
it, as a power at work in other things than our- 
selves, in the material world first of all, and then 
in the characters of men as a part of that visible 
world, we call it Beauty. And so we have the 
211c ff marvellous account, in the Symposium^ of the up- 
ward progression of the soul when, drawn by the 
charm of a fair form, she passes on to consider 
this form with other fair forms, and from these 
to fair actions, and from these to fair notions, 
and out of these to that one notion of absolute 
beauty, and catches glimpses of Beauty at last 
as it is in itself. This, be it observed, is not the 
surrender of the soul to the allurements of gold 
and rich vestments and the physical bloom of 
youth, which might lead us in a direction the 

7), has dealt magisterially with the subject of these lec- 
tures and of an esoteric doctrine. 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 201 

very opposite of the Good, but is, as it were, a 
rejection of these attractions while in the act of 
appreciating them. It is not, as in the case of 
the mere aesthete, a submersion of the soul in 
the flux of the world as the flux appears to us 
stayed and informed by a force equivalent to the 
inner check, but an invigorating sense of this 
force as so manifesting itself in the world and as 
drawing us by the world, and from the world, to 
itself. And he who thus rests his eyes upon the 
divine indwelling force of beauty, rather than 
upon its scattered and inert manifestations, will 
feel awakened within himself a kindred impulse, 
not of passive pleasure, but of moral energy, 
spurring him to engender true deeds of virtue, as 
an immortal being raised into the companionship 
of God. 

With that last word we see how easily the su- 
preme Idea passes into the field of religion. The 
apex of our aesthetic experience which was at- 
tained by the ascending steps of generalization is 
now conversely regarded as a creative energy 
reaching down into the world and imposing upon 
its fleeting substance the forms and order of sta- 
bihty. And this Cause of being, as contrasted 
with the not-being of chaos, will become to Plato, 
particularly in his later years, when in the 
Timaeus and the Laws he turns from the vexa- 
tions of metaphysical inquiry back to the less in- 
quisitive faith of youth, simply God; not the 



202 PLATONISM 

gods of the popular pantheon, whose story is 
filled with the evils and atrocities of human law- 
lessness, but the God, who is as it were the re- 
flection in the mirror of the universe — it may 
rather be the original and no reflection at all — 
of that daemonic check in the soul which is the 
cause of truth and beauty. 

But withal, however large a part we may sup- 
pose the supreme Idea to play in our aesthetic 
and religious life, it was still more important, in 
Plato's philosophy, to study it there in the soul 
itself. For thus alone we shall not infer it by 
metaphor or allegory, but know it, know it im- 
mediately in its pure essence, as that for which 
all other things are desired and which is the end 
of all desire — the Good. And how do we know 
that which surpasses knowing? The answer was 
given by Plato in the argimient of The Republic; 
it may be found summarily stated in an early 
Christian theologian who was often a better 
Academician than were the Pagans who usurped 
the name: "Plato himself says that happiness 
(eudaimonia) is the well-being of the daemon, 
and that by the daemon is meant the governing 
element of our soul, and that the most perfect 
and fullest Good is this happiness."^ ^^ 

® Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, II, xxii, 131: *Avto? 
8e 6 IIAaTwv T7]v evSaifioviav to ev tov BaLfiova €X^'*'' ^t'yuova Sc 
XeyeaOaL to t^s if/v)(rjs ^fxCiv -qyefxovLKOv, tyjv Sc €v6aLfxovLav to 
T€A.«OTaTOv dya^ov koI TrX-qpitrrarov Aeyci. 



DOCTRINE OF IDEAS WS 

In this consummation of Plato's dialectic we 
see how at last the three theses that wind in and 
out of his Dialogues are brought together and 
indissolubly united. The Good is the spiritual 
affirmation of Socrates, spoken now in the tested 
language of philosophy. It is the scepticism of 
Socrates, since it states a fact that cannot be de- Republic 508e 
fined in the terms of the understanding, and bids 
the reason submit to this fact as to a master. In 
its double aspect it is the solution of the Socratic 
paradox, since with the soul's own feeling of hap- 
piness it makes moral intuition the one certain 
thing above peradventure, thus identifying mo- 
rality and knowledge, while as the source of what 
light we have to guide us in the practical decis- 
ions of this world, it imparts a measure of truth 
to our judgments and the power of judging to 
the mind, thus identifying virtue and right opin- 
ion. It is the limit of self-consciousness, given 
by the soul to the imagination, and rendered by 
the imagination back to the soul as an Idea, 
:^ "more beautiful than truth or knowledge." 



CHAPTER VII 

SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 

With his habitual flexibility Plato, as we have 
seen, used the term "Idea" both for the rational- 
ized forms of things in time and space and for 
the immediate intuitions of the soul. The latter 
are the field of ethical dialectic, or true philo- 
sophy, the former of intellectual dialectic, or 
science; and the failure to discriminate resolute- 
ly between these two fields has been a fruitful 
source of error among self-styled Platonists 
from the beginning down to the present day. 
The confusion is in some measure attributable to 
the fact that Plato had at command no specific 
word corresponding to our conception of "sci- 
ence," but, as in Latin, so in Greek, the same 
general expression {scientia, episteme) had to do 
duty for all kinds of knowledge. The chief task 
of the conmientator, therefore, may sometimes 
seem to be nothing more than the imposition of 
a rigid terminology on the freer method of the 
Master. The process, one admits, is not without 
its dangers, similar to those that attend the 
hardening of religious faith into formulated 
creeds; but the risk is necessary, in the one case 

204 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 205 

as in the other, if we would guard oiu'selves 
against the heresies that seek authority under the 
cover of a great name. 

In the introductory books of The Republic 
Plato showed that a State is rightly governed 
when there is a proper division of the citizens and 
each class performs its own duties, one class 
guiding, another defending, another producing. 
In like manner an individual man is in a healthy 
condition when his various faculties function nor- 
mally. Both the State and the man, when so 
functioning, possess the several virtues of wis- 
dom, courage, and temperance, belonging re- 
spectively to the separate classes and faculties. 
In both, justice is regarded as the active prin- 
ciple which, by its power of temporary or per- 
manent veto, holds each class or faculty to the 
performance of its particular duty; it is the dy- 
namic centre of morality manifesting itself at 
the periphery in the specific virtues. Now this 
healthy condition can be assured only by that 
complete self-knowledge which will place philo- 
sophy in command of the soul and the philo- 
sopher at the head of the State. What, then, is 
the procedure by which we shall attain to this 
knowledge? Manifestly it is by means of a 
course of education directed not so much to the Republic sisc 
acquisition of crude information ( Plato accepted 
the old Greek saying that "much-learning does 
not educate the mind") as to the end of turning 



W6 PLATONISM 

the whole soul from the pursuit of shadows to the 
contemplation of the one light of truth. 
so9d ff It is at this point, before entering upon the 
intellectual discipline necessary for the philo- 
sopher, that Plato introduces the famous image 
of the divided line, the nature of which can be 
best displayed in a diagram, thus: 

Opinion Knowledge 

Conjecture I Belief I Understanding I Pure reason, 

I I I Knowledge 

Images, I Objects, I Mathematical 1 Ethical 

Reflections, etc. | Animals,etc.| forms | experiences 

At a first glance the main bifurcation here is 
that between the two great fields covered the one 
by opinion, with its two grades of conjecture and 
belief, and the other by knowledge, with its two 
corresponding grades; and this, indeed, is a 
dichotomy that runs all through Plato's works — 
on the one side the uncertain mutability of the 
phenomenal world and of our relation to it, on the 
other side the certain stability of the intelligible 
world. Yet, as we follow the application of his 
line to the actual system of education, we discover 
that the emphasis of division undergoes signifi- 
cant changes. To begin with, the first of the four 
members, that of images and conjecture, is quiet- 
ly dropped out of consideration, though, for other 
purposes, it is taken up again in the last book of 
Tlfie Republic. This leaves us with a threefold 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 207 

division of material objects, mathematical forms, 
and ethical experiences, which, it will be seen at 
a glance, correspond to the three classes of Plato's 
Ideas. Now, as Plato is dealing here with edu- 
cation as a discipline in the knowledge of Ideas, 
we should expect this triple classification to re- 
divide so as to indicate two main groups, embrac- 
ing on one side those generalizations from par- 
ticulars and those mathematical forms which to- 
gether are the subject matter of science, and on 
the other side those intuitions which belong to 
the true dialectic. And such is the case; Plato's 
line does ultimately conform to this fundamental 
dualism of his philosophy, although the fact is 
obscured somewhat by the peculiar bent of his 
mind. 

In his conception of science, contrariwise in 
this to his ethical procedure, Plato shows every- 
where a strong bias towards the deductive meth- 
od; and as a result his comparative contempt for 
pure observation and for generalization by in- 
duction led him to neglect the experimental and 
biological bases which Aristotle did so much to 
establish. Even the mania, as it might almost be 
called, for classification which infests some of his 
later Dialogues — notably the Sophist and the 
Politicus — does not work itself out by an induc- 
tive ascent from the less inclusive to the more in- 
clusive, but proceeds downward by a series of 
rather mechanical dichotomies. It follows that 



208 PLATONISM 

the parts of science admitted into his educational 
curriculum are preponderantly the deductive 
branches of mathematics, beginning with arith- 
metic and passing on through plane and solid 
geometry to astronomy and musical harmony. 
Though the Ideas corresponding to natural gen- 
era, which are treated in the inductive sciences, 
may not be excluded absolutely from such a 
scheme, they will sink to a very subordinate 
position. 

In determining the place of astronomy and 
music — more particularly the former — in such a 
curriculum, Plato raises the question whether the 
method of study then in vogue should not be 
changed for one better suited to the purpose of 
RepuMic S29c, philosophical training, and to this end he em- 
phasizes the difference between the mere observa- 
tion of phenomena and the pursuit of scientific, 
or mathematical, law. All these devious lights 
which we behold moving in the sky are indeed the 
fairest and most orderly of visible objects, yet 
are far from those true motions and those exact 
forms apprehensible by the understanding alone 
and not by the eyes. They are to be used as 
rough diagrams written out for us in the heavens 
and serviceable to the reason, but the geometer, 
though acknowledging their excellence as works 
of handicraft, would deem it absurd to study 
them seriously as if in them could be found the 
absolute laws of proportion. Now, some part of 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 209 

this contempt for the slower procedure of obser- 
vational science must be laid, as we have said, to 
Plato's ineradicable distrust for things as they 
are and to the deductive bias of his mind; but in 
a measure also it can be ascribed to the imperfec- 
tion of the available means of observation. The 
astronomer of that day possessed no mechanical 
instrument by which the motions of the celestial 
bodies could be accurately observed and so made 
the basis of mathematical formulae. Hence the 
scientific astronomer (in Plato's sense of the 
word) would be obliged to work upon an intel- 
lectualized sphere, so to speak, of which the visi- 
ble scroll of the heavens is a clumsy and ever- 
changing imitation. In this notion of a mathe- 
matical system which could be guessed at from 
what was actually observed, Plato was looking 
beyond his age to the time when the real science 
of astronomy was possible; but we may suppose 
also that, if he were Uving today, he would still 
hold it a form of illusion to believe that the rela- 
tions of material phenomena of any sort are such 
as can be contained in a complete equation. He 
would maintain that there is no perfect corre- 
spondence but only an approximation between 
the facts of observation and the generalized laws 
which belong rather to the apparatus of our own 
intelligence ; and in this, I take it, he would be in 
accord with the most recent trend of scientific 
theory. 



no PLATONISM 

Observational astronomy Plato, therefore, 
relegated to a place among the arts, and rejected 
its pretensions to the name of science. The 
higher education of the philosopher was not con- 
cerned with those Ideas which correspond to gen- 
eralizations from particular objects such as men 
or tables, or from the visible motions of phenom- 
ena, even the majestic phenomena of the heavens, 
but with those Ideas of form and quantity and 
time which belong to the pure understanding ; not 
with the stars and their measured orbits, but with 
the absolute circles and ellipses of an immaterial 
world. Yet this ideal science, all science indeed, 
is only a part of the propaedeutic to the veritable 
interest of the philosopher; we reach at last the 
essential division in Plato's scheme. To compre- 
hend this bifurcation we must recur again to the 
fourfold line in which the progress of education 
was figured, and must take note of a curious am- 
biguity in its terminology. 

Under the higher division of "knowledge," as 
distinguished from "opinion," are embraced two 
fields: one of mathematical forms and the cor- 
responding faculty, or understanding; the other 
of ethical experiences and the faculty corre- 
sponding to these, which, among its various ap- 
pellations, is called by precisely the same term, 
"knowledge," as that under which both of these 
spheres are subsumed. That is to say, we are 
brought once more face to face with the trouble- 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 211 

some fact that Plato recognized two kinds of 
knowledge (entirely apart from the realm of 
opinion), and that in some passages he treats 
these as if identical, while in other passages the 
central thesis of his philosophy seems to depend 
on maintaining a distinction between them. 

Certainly this distinction is made with formal 
precision, and the relative places of science and 
dialectic are settled without ambiguity, in the 
closing paragraphs of the sixth book. Students ^^"J'J'ff 
of arithmetic and geometry, it is there said, as- 
sume the odd and even forms, the three kinds of 
triangles, and the like as universally admitted 
hypotheses which need no proof, and from these 
proceed to demonstrate whatever problem they 
have in view. They use, indeed, visible figures in 
these demonstrations, but in reality their concern 
is with the absolute square, for instance, or the 
absolute diagonal, which exist in the understand- 
ing alone and of which the diagrams drawn by 
them are only symbols. This procedure belongs 
to the intelligible sphere of knowledge, although 
in it the soul cannot rise to first principles but is 
obliged to cling to hypotheses, employing for this 
purpose the intellectualized figures of those ma- 
terial objects of which the shadowy reflections (in 
the lowest of the four divisions) are the field of 
conjecture. Such is the sphere of geometry and 
the other mathematical sciences. In contrast 
with this is the higher sphere of the intelligible 



212 PLATONISM 

(the highest of the four divisions) . Here, reason 
starts indeed with hypotheses, as it does in sci- 
ence, but uses them merely as a point of de- 
parture for its ascent into a world that is above 
hypothesis, and so mounting climbs to the first 
principle of all (the Good). This is the world 
of knowledge and true being contemplated by 
dialectic (that is, ethical dialectic, as shown in 
Plato's practical illustrations, though he does not 
here so qualify it), a clearer and purer world 
than that of the sciences so-called. The activity 
of the mind concerned with geometry and its 
cognates is properly termed understanding and 
not reason (the higher reason, or intuition), as 
falling between opinion and reason.^ 

I do not see how it could be averred in plainer 
language that the essential division of the line 
marks off dialectic alone on the one side, and on 
the other side the three fields of which mathe- 
matics and its abstractions are the highest. And 
the value of science, as of the departments below 
it, is not in itself, but in its use as a gymnasium, 
or training place, for the mind that is preparing 
for the philosophic life. Each study, beginning 
with the common arts, is an illustration, so to 
speak, of that above it; practice of the lower 
faculty is a discipline for the exercise of the 

■^ Republic 51 Id: Aiavotav 8e KaXeiv ftoi SokcTs t^v t<ov yeoy- 
fierpLKOiv T€ Koi rrjv twv tolovtwv l^tv aW* ov vovv, w? fierai-u ri 
Sd^ijs Tc Kui VOX) T^v 8tavoiav ovtrav. 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 213 

higher, while the potential presence of the higher 
demonstrates itself in the activity of the lower. 
There is nothing of the "ivory tower" in this sys- 
tem, no place for the dreamer in wisdom or for 
the antinomian hypocrite; and Plato is as thor- 
oughly convinced as St. James that faith and ^^an^l'^'et fol^ 
works cannot be disjoined. How otherwise could 
it be in a doctrine wherein the assurance of truth 
takes the form of happiness attending an active 
and unremitting self-government? And so, how- 
ever sharply Plato's philosophy in its logical as- 
pect falls into an absolute dualism, in practice it 
is always presented as a slow ascent of the soul 
by the steps of physical and mental and moral 
discipline. 

If, in the course of education just described, 
the mathematical sciences seem to have usurped 
an undue prominence, our judgment of the fact 
must take various considerations into accoimt. 
In the first place it must be remembered that the 
training of the body and the ordinary instruction 
in the arts had already been discussed by Plato 
at great length in earlier books of The Republic, 
And, secondly, mathematical studies were the 
only ones sufficiently advanced in Greece to offer 
the sort of discipline obtained in our graduate 
schools today in many fields of history and lin- 
guistic beyond the preparatory and general 
education of the college. But even if this were 
not the case, it is probable that Plato would have 



214 PLATONISM 

regarded studies of which geometry is the type 
as pecuharly adapted to the immediate prepara- 
tion for the hfe in philosophy towards which all 
serious education was directed. For mathe- 
matics, like dialectic, deals with unchanging real- 
ities, though in a different sphere of the ideal 
world; and by our experience with the fixed 
hypothetical abstractions of mathematics he 
would hold that we are helped to rise above a du- 
bious recognition of the shifting standards of 
custom and tradition into loyalty to the eternal 
veracity of ethical Ideas. 

Furthermore, and this, perhaps, is the real key 
to Plato's exaggerated interest in the science of 
s25d number, mathematics rests finally on the basis 
of the one and the many, abstracting from the 
perception of the divisible one and the unifiable 
many the conception of an absolute One and an 
absolute Many. And this distinction between 
unity and multiplicity, the uniform and the va- 
rious, the unchanging and the changing, the self- 
complete and the progressive, at once abstract 
and corresponding to actual experience, is the 
only resource at our command to express in lan- 
guage of the understanding the ultimate dualism 
(as we thus call it) of consciousness upon which 
morality is founded. With this instrument at his 
disposal, the dialectical philosopher is able to 
give an account of himself, and to ward off de- 
lusive notions and the attacks of false logic. He 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 215 

not only possesses the faith of intuition, but is 
armed with the full panoply of discursive reason. 
In Socrates Plato saw the perfect model of such 
a dialectical gladiator. 

The Dialogue in which Plato develops his sci- 
entific theories in connection with a vision of the 
universe as a whole is the Timaeus, I suspect 
that most students who approach this strange 
piece of writing will undergo an experience some- 
what as follows. A first reading is likely to leave 
them merely confused and mystified. A second 
reading will lead them to feel that part of the 
Dialogue, the religious speculation, contains a 
sublime allegory, while another part, the scientific 
speculation, still repels them as futile and weari- 
some. A third reading may bring the conviction 
that even this scientific speculation, though in de- 
tail often resting on hasty assumptions and miss- 
ing the inductive method of experiment, is yet as 
a whole one of the very great achievements of the 
human brain. Certainly the attempt to reduce 
the material universe to a purely geometrical and 
mechanical system has allured thinking men from 
that day to this, with, it must be added, utterly 
different results according as they have been true 
or not to the spirit in which Plato himself con- 
ceived the function of science. 

Whatever may be doubtful in the interpreta- 
tion of the Timaeus, one thing ought to be be- 
yond question: the whole argument is founded 



216 PLATONISM 

on a radical dualism. To say, with the English 
editor, that here we find "Platonism as a com- 
plete and coherent scheme of monistic idealism,"^ 
is to suffer the error, only too common at the 
present day, of forcing into Plato's words a meta- 
physic which is quite contrary to their plain 
meaning. The true thesis is stated imequivocally 

27d in the opening sentences of the argument: "In 
the first place, then, in my opinion, we must dis- 
tinguish these two things: What is that which 
always is and has no becoming, and what is that 
which, always becoming, never is? The one, be- 
ing always the same, we comprehend by thought 
with reason; the other, becoming and perishing, 
never really being, we guess at by opinion with 
unreasoning perception." And this distinction 
is repeated at the opening of the second main di- 

47k vision of the argument: "What we have said 
hitherto, with slight exceptions, was concerned 
with exhibiting the things created through mind, 
or reason ; but we must now add to our exposition 

5iD the things that become out of necessity. ... If 
reason and true opinion are two things different 
in kind, then do the unchangeable Ideas surely 
exist as objects of reason alone, not perceptible 
by our senses; but if, as some hold, true opinion 
differs in nothing from reason, then all that we 
perceive by our bodily organs must be regarded 
as having the most real existence." 

^ Archer-Hind, Introduction, p. 2. 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 217 

That is to say, in both the grand divisions of 
the argument the starting-point is the immediate 
consciousness of that duahsm within the soul it- 
self which, intellectually, appears as knowledge 
and opinion; and from this the assumption is 
made that the world of which we are members 
must conform in some way to this double opera- 
tion of consciousness. If we have reason, a cer- 
tainty of knowledge, there must exist in the imi- 
verse at large a sphere of changeless, eternal ob- 
jects which can thus be known, the Ideas, and 
these must be absolutely different in kind from 
the objects of physical perception which have the 
changing, ephemeral nature of opinion. The cos- 
mogony of the Timaeus will be a marvellously 
unrolling picture of the relation and interaction 
between these two elements, a supreme effort of 
the imagination working out the story of crea- 
tion, not in capricious license, but imder the con- 
trol at each step of the law of our own inner be- 
ing — at least such ought to be the procedure, 
and such the procedure is when Plato remains 
true to his own law of scepticism. 

At the centre of this story lies the great pas- 
sage, already quoted as one of the mottoes of this 
book, which, more clearly perhaps than any other 
words in Plato, states the purpose and character 
of his philosophical investigation: "Wherefore ess 
we must discriminate between two kinds of cause, 
the one of necessity, the other divine: and the 



218 PLATONISM 

divine cause we must seek in all things, to the 
end that we may possess a happy life so far as 
our nature permits; and the necessary cause for 
the sake of the divine, reflecting that otherwise 
we cannot apprehend by themselves those truths 
which are the object of our serious study, nor 
grasp them or in any other way partake of them." 
Such is the double aspect of the world, a divine 
element and a substratum of brute necessity, as 
reflected in the dualism of our own souls ; and the 
tale of creation is divided accordingly into two 
sections, as the work is considered to proceed 
from above downwards or from below upwards. 
In the first account, taken in briefest outline, 
we are told how God creates the actual world as 
a living animal in likeness of the ideal world. As 
to the manner in which Plato conceives this ideal 
model of which our imiverse is the imperfect, but 
the best possible, imitation, there is no clear state- 
ment ; the conception is left in the same mythical 
penumbra that always surrounds his theory of 
Ideas. Are these Ideas, we ask, the thoughts of 
God, or are they eternal laws, or substantial enti- 
ties of some sort existing outside of himself ; and 
there is no definite reply. The like insoluble 
question, whether holiness and righteousness are 
determined by God's will or themselves determine 
iod it, was raised in the Euthyphro, as it has been 
raised since by Christian theologians and left un- 
answered. In a general way we may say this: 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 219 

that the conception of Ideas runs parallel in 
Plato's mind with the mythology of a vaguely 
personal deity; when the mere immanence of the 
divine in the phenomenal world, or the similarity 
of the phenomenal to the divine, is dominant in 
his thought, then the divine floats before his vis- 
ion as the Ideal, and he speaks as a philosopher ; 
but when the divine is considered rather as an 
energy or cause working upon brute material and 
moulding it as a man shapes an image to his will, 
then he is wont to speak in theological language 
of God, the creator and upholder and judge. 

Having created this world-soul and its vehicle, 
God then mixes what remains of the soul-stuff, 
distributes it to the stars (not as planetary souls, 
but as material for further use), and implants 
in it knowledge of its destiny and duty. There- 
upon he rests, and calls upon the lesser gods to 
fashion the various creatures in their kinds, leav- 
ing this task to his lieutenants lest any one 
should impute to the hand of the supreme Demi- 
urge the imperfections that must inhere in indi- 
vidual things. First his delegates compose the 
soul of man, of three parts: reason, which is 
placed in the brain and so separated from the 
other two faculties and from the influence of the 
grosser body; the thymos (the seat of the per- 
sonal emotions), which goes to the breast, and is 
generally an assistant of reason in governing the 
third faculty; and this third faculty, the concu- 



220 PLATONISM 

piscent element, situated in the abdomen. As in 
The Republic, the significant division is between 
reason, which is divine and immortal, and the 
emotional and concupiscent members of the soul, 
which are mortal and often indistinguishable 
from the body. 

The second part of the Dialogue takes up the 
story of creation from the material side. The 
substratum of the world, upon which the Demi- 
urge and his delegates work, is described as the 
expansion of space, or the irregular and unrest- 
ing flux, which is brought into comparative order 
by the imposition of limits and geometric forms. 
We have thus the fundamental dualism falling 
into a counterpart of the fourfold scheme of the 
Philebus: at the one extreme is the "cause," or 
God, at the other extreme the "infinite*' (apei- 
ron, more properly the limitlessness of chaos than 
our notion of infinity) ; and between them the ir- 
rational relation of these two extremes, expressed 
as the "limit," or mathematical form, and the 
"limited," or formal world. But for the infinite 
of the Philebus Plato substitutes in the Timaeus 
a term of wider and deeper significance. This 
substratum of the limitless flux is now called by 
the name "necessity" (ananke), which points at 
once to the double aspect of creation that was al- 
ways more or less clearly present to Plato's mind. 
So important, in fact, is the implication of this 
word, that on its interpretation may depend one's 
right to be classed as a true Platonist. 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY SSI 

As in the philosophical mythology Goodness is 
placed at the apex of the Ideas, whence its in- 
fluence reached down the ladder of life, so in the 
theological view of creation Goodness is the mo- 
tive of God's action and the end of being. "He 
was good," says Timaeus at the beginning of his ^^e 
tale, "and in the good there never can be envy of 
aught. And being free from this quality, he de- 
sired all things to be as like to himself as possi- 
ble. This is that sovereign principle of creatioij 
and of the imiverse which we most certainly shall 
be right in accepting from wise men. For God, 
in his desire that all things should be good and 
that, so far as possible, there should be nothing 
evil, took the visible material as it came to him, 
lying not in a state of rest but moving without 
harmony or measure; and out of disorder he 
brought it into order, thinking such a state alto- 
gether better than the other." And so, when the 
act of creation is completed, the world is a place 
of forms and motions ordered to the end of good- 
ness, in so far as is permitted by natural neces- 
sity consenting and yielding to the persuasion of 
reason. 

In the use of this word "necessity" we see how 
the ethical basis of Plato's philosophy becomes 
in his cosmogony teleological. Here, as always, 
his point of departure is the consciousness of our 
moral being, and if there may seem to be some 
taint of the pathetic fallacy in such a reading of 



222 PLATONISM 

human motive into nature, it is fair to remember 
that any comprehensible theory of the cause of 
things must incur the same condemnation. The 
modern conception of natural law, though ex- 
pressed in the most strictly scientific terms, will 
in the end be found to depend on an implicit 
trust in the submission of nature to reason and 
rightness. The chief difference is that the mod- 
ern man of science, in formulating his general 
hypotheses, is likely to be less aware of his men- 
tal processes and more subject to naive illusions 
than was Plato. 

But if necessity has this teleological aspect, it 
has also another aspect in which formal reason 
rather than purpose is pre-eminent. Looked at 
in one way (which is the essentially Platonic 
way) the theory of a divine cause and necessity 
exhibits even the material world as the field of 
ethical Ideas ; from another point of view it seems 
for the moment to leave these in obscurity, and 
shows only the rational Ideas of form and num- 
ber. Then it may be that the immortal soul it- 
self, whether animating the universe as a whole 
or the individual creatures within the universe, 
is described, in the language of a geometrician, as 
possessing the faculty of reason and self-govern- 
ment because its secret motions follow the laws 
of mathematical proportion, and, a fortiori, the 
material world is conceived as a rational system 
because of the imposition of these same laws upon 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 223 

the chaos of necessity. We are in the reahn of 
physical science. 

In accordance with the popular notions of the 
day Plato divided matter into the four elements ; 
but these were rather variations of one aborigi- 
nal substance in its fiery, gaseous, liquid, and 
solidified states than separate and permanent 
substances. I shall not attempt to follow his 
elaborate account of the production of these ele- 
ments and of their combinations and mutations. 
In brief, Plato traces geometric forms back to 
their origin, and finds that the simplest figures 
are the scalene and the isosceles triangle. By 
combinations of the former he constructs the 
equilateral triangle, and from this the three regu- 
lar solids — the pyramid, the octohedron, and the 
icosahedron. Out of the isosceles triangle he 
constructs the square, and from this the cube. 
By the imposition of these four tridimensional 
figures on the formless substratum he creates re- 
spectively his four elements — fire, air, water, 
earth. The actual phenomena perceived by us, 
as well as the organs of perception, result from 
the adhesions, transmutations, and interactions of 
these elements caused by the unresting impulse 
which they bring with them out of the aboriginal 
flux of necessity. 

Many of the details of Plato's system display 
the faults of a mind too easily satisfied with a 
priori reasoning, yet in its main outlines it is one 



2M PLATONISM 

of the most grandiose and fruitful of human in- 
ventions. The substance of the world as he saw 
it was intrinsically that to which the chemist and 
physicist of today are looking — a field of energy 
the differentiations of which are expressed in nu- 
merical formulae, or, in other words, a combina- 
tion of motion and form. The whole reach of 
manifest existence, from the obscure actions of 
the atom to the uttermost sweep of the revolving 
spheres of the heavens, falls into a vast mathe- 
matical equation. Much of the inspiration of 
this theory came to Plato, no doubt, from Pytha- 
gorean and other sources, but what to his prede- 
cessors had been a vague dream he saw as a co- 
ordinate and rational system. So far as the 
mathematical interpretation of the material uni- 
verse can be attributed to the invention of one 
human brain, the honour of the achievement be- 
longs to Plato. 

It is not strange that the Timaeus should have 
been one of the most influential of Plato's works. 
Through the Middle Ages the role of the Demi- 
urge harmonized sufficiently with the Hebrew 
Jehovah to shape the Christian conceptions of 
creation, while the Ideas as models of the visible 
world could be accepted as the eternal thoughts 
of God, thus bringing philosophy and theology 
into a peaceful union. With the RenaissaiJce 
other aspects of the Dialogue came more to the 
front, and played no inconsiderable part in that 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 225 

mathematical revival which, side by side with the 
biological and inductive principles of develop- 
ment, marked the great awakening of science. 
But it must be admitted, however reluctantly, 
that, so far as the influence of Plato has been felt 
in this direction, it has tended to foster rather an 
improper subordination of philosophy to science 
than a furtherance of legitimate scientific dis- 
covery. And for this degradation of philosophy, 
though it is in essence the very contrary of 
Platonism, we cannot entirely exonerate Plato 
himself. It may not be fair to blame him for the 
common failure to comprehend what has been 
called his economy of method, his habit, that is, 
of taking for granted that the main theses of his 
philosophy will be kept in memory by his reader 
and need not be constantly repeated when some 
outlying question is imder consideration. Nor is 
it to his discredit that he was always the searcher 
after truth, winding his arguments sinuously 
back and forth in such a way that one not natu- 
rally akin to him in spirit may easily miss the 
steady tidal setting of his thought. But it is a 
different matter when at times he allows himself 
to be so far carried away by subordinate inter- 
ests as to approach something like treachery to 
his own deeper intuition. In particular there is 
abundant evidence in the Dialogues and else- 
where that in his old age he wandered into a 
mathematical mysticism for which enigmatic is 



226 PLATONISM 

a mild word. The numerical proportion on 
which the soul of the world is constructed in the 
35a 5 Timaeus, the calculation of the great year of ex- 
546b €f istence in The Republic, to take the examples 
that have maddened innumerable commentators, 
are fantastic and, at bottom, meaningless. It 
may be also that in his lectures on the Good he 
permitted this lust of science to usurp a place in 
the realm of ethical dialectic which he himself 
had denied to it. We can in a way understand 
his purpose and justify his procedure. These 
mathematical entities to which he reduced moral 
values were, we may suppose, not actual num- 
bers, but the principles of number — if such a 
phrase means anything. The quantitative Ideas 
of unity and division might be taken as symbols 
of the qualitative Ideas of dialectic; and for this 
substitution there is a certain intellectual justi- 
fication, as I have pointed out, so long as the 
character of the substitution is not forgotten. 
But such a procedure is at least perilous in itself, 
and was certainly disastrous in its consequences. 
It was almost inevitable that his followers, lack- 
ing his own sure intuition, should seize on this 
mathematical symbolism and apply it in the 
crudest fashion to the expression of dialectical 
truths — how crude the fashion we may see in the 
spurious continuation of the Laws entitled Epi- 
nomis. This recrudescence of Pythagorean spec- 
ulations must have begun very soon after Plato's 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 227 

death. At least we know that Xenocrates, who 
succeeded Speusippus, Plato's nephew, as head 
of the Academy, defined the world-soul and indi- 
vidual souls as self -moving number. Naturally 
the critics of Platonism laid hold of this mad- 
ness and exaggerated its importance. Aristotle^ 
did not hesitate to ridicule the theory of Xeno- 
crates in particular as the most absurd ever 
broached by man. 

This is the phase of Platonism that, despite its 
early critics, has been cropping up in modern 
times ever since the Renaissance. It would not 
be easy to say how far these unexpected results 
may be traced to a renewed interest in Plato 
along with the revival of science, and how far 
they are attributable to the natural inclination of 
the human mind to magnify the scope of its own 
achievements.* But certainly the analogy of the 
geometrical scheme of the Timaeus with the 
mechanistic hypotheses of Descartes is sufficient- 
ly close to suggest at least an imconscious causal 
relation between the two. And from Descartes 
the mischievous confusion comes to a cHmax in 
Spinoza, who undertakes to interpret the world 
by an argument proceeding from axioms to 
theorems and corollaries after the rigorous man- 
ner of EucHd's geometry. From such a system 

^ De Anima, 1, iv, 16. 

* For the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism in this 
respect, see Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik I, 
pp. 264-269. 



228 PLATONISM 

teleological design and liberty of the spirit are 
absolutely excluded. If the universe is to be ex- 
plained entirely on mathematical principles, it 
must be purely mechanical in its structure, with 
no place for spontaneity or deliberate purpose. 
The Darwinian law of evolution by natural se- 
lection, in which biology joined hands with a 
mathematical law of probability, gave new sanc- 
tion to the inclusion of the human spirit in the 
grinding cogs of a huge machine. The "block 
universe" of Huxley, though he violently repudi- 
ated Platonism, is in reality a late stage of the 
scientific philosophy that, apparently, was im- 
ported into the Academy by Xenocrates. And 
in our own days we have the much-applauded ef- 
forts of Mr. Bertrand Russell and certain of the 
so-called New Realists to reduce the Platonic 
Ideas to mathematical entities. 

It is easy, as I have said, to see how this sub- 
jection of philosophy to mathematics may be as- 
sociated with certain unguarded statements of 
Plato in the Timaeus and elsewhere, but it rests, 
nevertheless, on a total misconception of his real 
position. The relation of dialectic to science is, 
in fact, precisely the same in the Timaeus as in 
The Republic, The two realms of Ideas at their 
beginning lie close together, and the knowledge 
of the one may almost coalesce with the know- 
ledge of the other. At least in the degree of cer- 
tainty attending them the moral generalizations 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 229 

from our conduct may seem at their start to dif- 
fer little from the mathematical and geometric 
abstractions of the intellect; but the progress 
from the two classes of generalizations is in dia- 
metrically opposite directions. In the case of 
dialectic we proceed from hypothesis to the un- 
hypothetical facts of ethical experience, and so, 
by the gradual elimination of what is contingent, 
rise to the immediate consciousness of that ele- 
ment of the soul which is the basis of our moral 
nature, and to the imaginative conception of God, 
or the Good, as the primal cause of order and 
beauty and joy in the world; whereas in the case 
of science we proceed by continually immersing 
the Ideas deeper and deeper into the lawless un- 
knowable flux of necessity. As we pass from the 
pure science of mathematics to the more mixed 
and comphcated fields of physics and chemistry 
and biology, our laws become continually less 
rigorous, our formulae more subject to exception 
and reversal, our generalization more dependent 
on the accumulation of detailed observation. It 
is for this reason that all through the Timaeus 
we find Plato, as soon as he leaves the abstrac- 
tions of number and form, employing the words 
"probable" (eikos) , "probably" (eikotos) ; and 
the measure of the gap between scientific conjec- 
ture and dialectical assurance may be taken by 
comparing the constant and unabashed use of 
such phrases in the Timaeus with Plato's scorn 



230 PLATONISM 

and contempt in the Phaedrus and elsewhere for 
the sophistical substitution of probability and 
flattery for the unyielding truth in questions of 
civic and personal morality. To ascribe know- 
ledge and certainty to physical science and to 
deny man's inner freedom by imprisoning the 
spirit in a huge mechanism of fixed and calculable 
natural law is to invert the whole order of the 
Platonic philosophy. 

The result of such an inversion is shown strik- 
ingly in the different connotations of the word 
"necessity" in Plato and Marcus Aurelius. To 
the former necessity meant the resistance of the 
meaningless and incomprehensible flux of things, 
whether in nature or the human soul, to the gov- 
ernment of order and happiness ; it was the exact 
contrary of the spirit, which is shrined in liberty. 
To the imperial Stoic necessity was the binding 
force of the whole world, leaving to the spirit this 
poor relic of freedom alone, that it might form its 
own opinion as to the moral character of the uni- 
versal flux of which it was itself also a part, and 
so might persist in praising that as good which it 
felt to be evil. The stoicism of a Marcus Aure- 
lius was not without its forcible consolations, but 
for all its protestations it was intrinsically a doc- 
trine of sadness and of spiritual sterility ; and the 
modern stoicism of science is gray with the same 
disease. More than that, there is no stable foun- 
dation of conduct in this physical necessity taken 



SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 231 

as a substitute for spiritual law. In the end men 
will clamour for release from such joyless servi- 
tude ; if they cannot discover the way of freedom 
in the law of the spirit, they will throw open the 
gate of the soul to the throng of invading de- 
sires, and the stoical necessity of science, save 
for the few exceptional minds, will remain as a 
theory, while in practice the mass of mankind 
will follow a rebellious and epicurean individ- 
ualism. 



CHAPTER VIII 



METAPHYSICS 



By metaphysics I should say that, here and 
elsewhere, I mean something different from phil- 
osophy. The latter is the sincere and humble en- 
deavour to make clear and precise to ourselves 
the fundamental facts of our conscious life, and 
47a than philosophy, as Plato says in the Timaeus, 
no greater good has come nor ever will come to 
mortal men as a gift from the gods. Its method 
and its truth are summed up in the three Socratic 
theses — scepticism, spiritual affirmation, and the 
paradoxical identification of virtue and know- 
ledge. Metaphysics differs from philosophy in 
this, that it essays to give a consistent explana- 
tion of the rerum natura, including our conscious- 
ness, in the terms of pure reason, thereby playing 
false to the law of scepticism and affecting a 
rational reconciliation of the Socratic dualism. 
266b "' Reason in itself is the faculty of combining and 
dividing. Thus, in what may be broadly called 
the world of science, reason is properly employed 
in combinations ending in mathematical unity 
and in divisions proceeding to the infinitesimal. 
It fulfils also a most important function in philo- 
sophy, so long as it follows the perception of 



METAPHYSICS 233 

actual similarities and differences in what may be 
called the quantitative field of our moral exper- 
ience; the whole sphere of practical virtue is to 
this extent dependent upon it. But reason be- 
comes metaphysical — or eristic, as Plato would 
have said — the moment it presumptuously disre- 
gards the dualism of consciousness and attempts 
by its own naked force to build up a theoretic 
world of abstract unity excluding multiplicity or 
of abstract multiplicity excluding unity. Mor- 
ally expressed, it is equally the error of metaphys- 
ics to explain away the reality of evil in favour of 
some conception of infinite goodness and to deny 
the existence of the absolute Good in favour of 
some conception of infinite relativity.^ 

The former error, that of false idealism, crept 
into the Academy at an early date. From the 
conmientary of Proclus on. the passage in the 
Timaeus concerning the goodness of God and 
God's treatment of the flux of necessity in crea- 
tion,^ it appears that these words were the battle- 
ground of two great schools of interpretation, 
echoes of whose wrangling still disturb the air of 
quiet study. The leaders of one of these sects 
were Plutarch and, more particularly, Atticus 
(not, of course, the friend of Cicero, but a writer 
of the second half of the second century a.d.), 

^ For this distinction between dialectic and eristic (or 
metaphysic) see Philebus 17a. 

^ See the preceding chapter, p. 221. 



234 PLATONISM 

who saw in Plato first of all the ethical philoso- 
pher. To them the distinction between good and 
evil was primordial and eternal. The substratum 
of the flux existed always, and received its im- 
pulse to chaotic motion from an eternal soul of 
evil. Here they would have been wiser had they 
been satisfied with Plato's deliberate choice of the 
ambiguous word "necessity" for the nature of 
this substratimi, instead of laying undue empha- 
sis on a phrase in the Laws and erecting our con- 
896e sciousness of good and evil into an unverifiable 
hypothesis of two world-souls. A more serious 
error lay in introducing the order of time into the 
moral order, and in insisting on a temporal pri- 
ority of the flux and the soul of evil to the event 
of creation. To this degree they changed the 
allegory of the Timaeus to a rationalized transac- 
tion, and laid themselves open to charges of in- 
consistency which their opponents were not slow 
to drive home. 

The other school, represented by Porphyry, 
lamblichus, and the later Neoplatonists general- 
ly, including Proclus himself, sought for the car- 
dinal doctrine of Plato in intellectual Ideas (de- 
spite the fact that Plato had subordinated these 
immistakably to the ethical order of which alone 
we have pure knowledge), and so virtually de- 
nied the antinomy of good and evil in favour of a 
rationally imified conception of the imiverse. 
Starting with the assumption of a superessential 



METAPHYSICS ^B5 

monism, they rebuked the views of their dualistic 
opponents as impiously abrogating either the 
goodness or the omnipotence of God. If God, 
they said, is both absolutely good and creatively 
omnipotent, then his work of creation must be 
eternal and entirely good. Brought face to face 
with the question of existing evil, they explained 
it away by a vast hocus-pocus of metaphysical 
emanations and subsumptions. The Whole is 
absolutely one and absolutely good, but by its 
very attribute of being it must be productive 
of other being, and creation becomes a process 
of endless self -division of the One which some- 
how leaves the One undivided. The members 
so produced are good, as related to the whole; 
they may appear evil, as related to one another. 
Evil is merely a Contingent of subordinate ex- 
istence^ — all of which, to the mind hungering 
after the truth, is nothing but "words, words, 
words." 

Now, whatever may have been the mistakes of 
Atticus otherwise, in his insistence on the prime 
importance of both good and evil as facts not to 
be juggled out of sight he was faithful to his 
master in the matter which really counted philo- 
sophically; and, in general, the little we know of 
him from Proclus and Eusebius leads us to es- 
teem him as one of the few genuine Platonists, 

^ Hav TO KaKov Kara Trapviroa-raa-LV eo-rt. — Proclus, In 
Timaeum 116a. 



236 PLATONISM 

and to regret the loss of his works as a calamity. 
It is, perhaps, the most deplorable event in the 
history of philosophy that the true tradition of 
Platonism was swallowed up in Neoplatonism 
and never to this day has escaped from the verbal 
metaphysic of a Proclus/ 

Plato's own attitude towards the claims of 
metaphysics is best seen in the Dialogue, called 
by the name of his great monistic predecessor, in 
which he comes to close grips with the rational 
contradictions inherent in the doctrine of Ideas; 

* There is an interesting passage in the introduction to 
Thomas Taylor's translation of the Select Works of Ploti- 
nus, which shows how the leaders of the romantic revival, 
by a natural affinity, turned for their Platonism to the 
Alexandrian interpreters. "For though Grantor, Atticus, 
Albinus, Galen, and Plutarch," he says, "were men of great 
genius, and made no common proficiency in philosophic at- 
tainments, yet they appear not to have developed the pro- 
fundity of Plato's conceptions; they withdrew not the veil 
which covers his secret meaning, like the curtains which 
guarded the adytum of temples from the profane eye; and 
they saw not that all behind the veil is luminous, and that 
there divine spectacles everywhere present themselves to 
the view. This task was reserved for men who were born 
indeed in a baser age, but who being allotted a nature simi- 
lar to their master were the true interpreters of his sublime 
and mystic speculations. Of these Plotinus was the leader, 
and to him this philosophy is indebted for its genuine restor- 
ation, and for that succession of philosophic heroes 
[Porphyry, lamblichus, Proclus, et al.], who were lumi- 
nous links of the golden chain of deity." — And still today 
the English editor of the Timaeus, Mr. Archer-Hind, in his 
note to the passage under consideration (30a), expressly 
ranges himself with the Neoplatonists. 



METAPHYSICS 237 

and our view of his philosophy is likely in the 
end to be coloured by our interpretation of this 
extraordinary piece of writing. Now it may be 
admitted at once that, if ever there was a prob- 
lem that verified the proverb quot homines tot 
sententiae, it is the meaning of the Parmenides, 
The literature on the subject is enormous, and is 
based on views not only divergent in various de- 
grees but often mutually destructive. I take it 
that the Platonist or the student of philosophy 
generally will at least be grateful for a classified 
survey of these interpretations, however he may 
feel disposed towards the new interpretation 
which I have the temerity to add to the list al- 
ready portentously long. 

To begin with the extremists. There are those 
who see in the Dialogue a frank and imreserved 
attack on the doctrine of Ideas, and who, accord- 
ingly, reject the work as spurious, on the ground, 
mainly, that Plato himself could not possibly 
have treated the central thesis of his philosophy 
in this manner. The first to support this view was 
Socher.^ The other extreme is represented by 
Fouillee, who takes the Dialogue throughout as 
a positive argument for Ideas.^ His position is 
briefly this: in the first part of the Dialogue 
Parmenides shows that the union of contraries in 
the sensible world implies a similar union of con- 

^ Ueber Platon's Schriften, published in 1820. 
^ La Philosophie de Platon I, 203, 204. 



288 PLATONISM 

traries in the Ideas, and that the difficulties which 
concern the participation of sensible things in 
Ideas will be solved when we see how one Idea 
participates in another. Hence the second part 
of the Dialogue takes up this point, and demon- 
strates that whatever hypothesis you start with, 
it always involves the primitive union of contra- 
ries, the radical union of the one and the many. 
Thus, whatever pair of Ideas you may consider, 
positive and negative, you will always find a 
mediating term in some third Idea, so that all 
Ideas, even those mutually contradictory, enter 
into one another and are reconciled in the su- 
preme Unity. In other words, for Plato read 
Hegel. 

To these two extremes should be added Grote's 
cavalier denial of any consistent meaning at all in 
Plato. He regards the theory of Ideas sup- 
ported by Socrates in this Dialogue as genuinely 
Platonic, and at the same time regards Parme- 
nides' attack on the theory as "most powerful" 
in itself and as beyond the reach of Plato's an- 
swer. The whole Dialogue has no other purpose 
than to clear the mind of false and hasty assump- 
tions : "It is certainly well calculated to produce 
the effect intended — of hampering, perplexing, 
and putting to shame, the affirmative rashness of 
a novice in philosophy."'^ 

Now these interpretations cannot all be right, 

"^ Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates II, 295. 



METAPHYSICS 239 

and I think it would be easy to demonstrate that 
they are all wrong. As for Socher, it is suffi- 
cient to say that the Dialogue bears on every 
page indubitable signs of the master's hand, and 
to ask who else could have written it. This in- 
trinsic evidence is so convincing that almost all 
scholars now accept the work as authentic. 
Moreover, the objections lose their point as soon 
as we have found (as I think we shall find) an 
interpretation which gives the Dialogue an im- 
portant and integral place in the whole meta- 
physical discussion of Plato's later years. On 
the other hand, Fouillee quite overshoots the 
mark. Virtually to ignore, as he does, the val- 
idity of the arguments against Ideas is simply to 
read the book with closed mind. As for the sec- 
ond part, even Zeller, from whom he borrowed 
his Hegelianizing method, recognized that the 
nature of the antinomies here employed indicates 
an absolute gulf between true Being and the em- 
pirical world of time and space.^ 

Grote maintains his position with his usual 
cleverness and honesty, but I doubt if he has any 
followers today. To hold that Plato never at- 
tained a philosophical position of his own, and 
that the great bulk of his works contains no posi- 
tive plan or conviction, is to fly in the face of 
common sense. 

Those who take a middle ground between the 

® Die Philosophie der Griechen^ II, i, 565. 



240 PLATONISM 

extremes of Socher and Fouillee are so numerous 
that it would be intolerably tedious to deal with 
them individually. We can get the same result 
more conmiodiously by a rough classification of 
the points which, with negligible shades of differ- 
ence, are variously combined in their theories. 
On one point they pretty well agree : they nearly 
all acknowledge the strength of the Parmenidean 
attack on the position held by Socrates in this 
Dialogue ; they differ in their methods of avoid- 
ing the disagreeable consequences of this admis- 
sion. They all make Parmenides the mouthpiece 
of Plato in this first part of the Dialogue, but 
to some of them the "young" Socrates is vainly 
attempting to support an embryonic theory of 
Ideas which Plato had now outgrown, whereas 
to others Socrates is arguing for a theory of 
Ideas (as entities separate from the world of 
phenomena) which was advanced by enemies of 
Plato, whether frankly as their own or in Plato's 
name, or was erroneously supposed to be Plato's 
by inconsiderate pupils of the Academy. By 
exploding this false doctrine Plato, either directly 
or inferentially, is enforcing the genuine doctrine 
of Ideas as pure conceptions of the mind, or as 
"the basis of potentiality," or "scientific laws," or 
"the methodic foundation of experience." In 
other words, they differ in naming the source and 
degree of the error supported by Socrates, but 
they all agree in holding that, in one way or an- 



METAPHYSICS Ml 

other, the Dialogue looks to a rationalizing recon- 
ciliation of the difficulties inherent in the doctrine 
of Ideas ; they all, in various ways, belong to the 
metaphysical school represented of old by Pro- 
clus and in modern times by Hegel. 

Now the first difficulty in these explanations 
is the supposition that in a question vital to 
his whole philosophy Plato would have chosen 
Socrates as the mouthpiece of the doctrine he 
wished to combat. The difficulty is not quite so 
overwhelming, I admit, if we assume that the 
"young" Socrates is arguing for a genuine Pla- 
tonism now outgrown rather than for a pseudo- 
Platonism. But such an assumption throws 
us into another insurmountable difficulty. 'No 
doubt in the course of his growth Plato changed 
somewhat in his attitude towards Ideas ; it could 
hardly be otherwise. But there is nothing in his 
writings to indicate such a complete break as 
must be assimaed by this explanation of the Par- 
menides, whereas, on the contrary, there are pas- 
sages in his latest works which speak strongly for lIw^ 'iesc^'' 
the essential continuity of his philosophy in this 
respect. 

Against those who would see in Socrates the 
champion of pseudo-Platonism, there are two 
further objections. On the one hand the concep- 
tualist doctrine of Ideas which they regard as 
genuinely Platonic is clearly embraced among ^^]^2b^^^^ 
the various explanations set up by Socrates and 



242 PLATONISM 

knocked down by Parmenides. On the other 
Ibid. 134D hand, in this very Dialogue it is shown that the 
rejection of Ideas as existing apart in a sphere 
above our own involves the rejection also of the 
divine government and knowledge of the world — 
a conclusion so abhorrent to Plato that he could 
not have accepted the premise. And I hold it 
demonstrable (though to prove the point would 
require a separate essay) that the whole recent 
movement to deprive Platonic Ideas of some 
sort of independent reality for the imagination 
is, on the bare face of it, a perversion of the 
simple facts, for the conscious or unconscious 
purpose of confirming the tendency of present- 
day thought by the authority of a revered name 
of the past. 

When they come to the second part of the 
Dialogue these mediators take different and con- 
tradictory groimds. Some of them hold that 
Parmenides remains the spokesman for Plato 
throughout, and that, having exploded the false 
doctrine of Ideas, he now demonstrates the true 
doctrine. To these the same reply must be made 
as was made to Fouillee : this second part of the 
Dialogue, unless violently distorted, is, like the 
first, negative from beginning to end, and to dis- 
cover in it a positive exposition of any doctrine 
is a wanton reading of what is not written. Oth- 
ers hold that Plato first uses Parmenides as his 
own mouthpiece to destroy the pseudo-doctrine 



METAPHYSICS 243 

foisted upon him by the Eleaties, and then, in a 
super-refined spirit of revenge, turns the table 
by making Parmenides exhibit the fallacies of 
his own Eleatic philosophy of the one. This ex- 
planation contains, as we shall see, a half truth, 
but it overreaches itself in taking Parmenides 
now as the exponent of Platonic truth and then 
as the exponent of Eleatic untruth. Plato was 
subtle enough, in all conscience, but he was not 
quite so disconcertingly double-faced as that. 
And, further, though a minor result of the sec- 
ond discussion may be to expose the untenability 
of the Eleatic unity in its absolute, exclusive 
form, the primary intention and achievement of 
Parmenides will turn out to be of an entirely dif- 
ferent nature. 

So much for the interpretations which run 
counter to common sense or to plain statements 
in the Dialogue itself or to the whole tenor of 
Plato's philosophy. A few scholars have partly 
or wholly avoided these errors, and have left ex- 
planations which are rather inadequate than 
false. Among these is the author of the Greek 
Thinkers, with whom, considering his general at- 
titude towards Greek philosophy, I find myself 
rather unwillingly yoked. Gomperz holds that 
the Parmenides was written at a time when 
Plato's mind was in a state of fermentation. At- 
tacks from the Megarians, or new Eleaties, had 
imited with his own deepened reflection to dis- 



244 PLATONISM 

turb him with difficulties in regard to the very 
basis of his metaphysical theory of Ideas. He 
could not at this time answer these difficulties, 
neither could he surrender his whole philosophy. 
In his zeal for the truth, therefore, he brings to- 
gether all the arguments against Ideas, making 
no discrimination between those that are answer- 
able and those that are not. In this way he de- 
livers himself, so to speak, and is free to pass on. 
He piles up all sorts of arguments against the 
metaphysical school from which had proceeded 
the sharpest attacks on the theory of Ideas. Af- 
ter the date of the Parmenides we see two things 
happening : Plato's searching analysis of hostile 
doctrines brings out by way of indirect proof the 
inevitability of the doctrine of Ideas, and the trial 
through which he has passed leads him to modify 
his own principles.^ 

One thing is thus seen by Gomperz which 
ought to be clear to any one who reads the Dia- 
logue with open mind: the logic against Ideas is 
conducted with relentless rigour, and is not di- 
rected against a particular form of the doctrine 
but against all its forms, including conceptual- 
ism.'^ 

® Griechische Denker II, 437-440. 

^° 132b: ''Perhaps/' says Socrates, "each of these Ideas 
is only an act of cognition, and is nowhere present except in 
the mind." Only in one place does Parmenides leave the 
position of Socrates unassailed. Socrates proposes a simile 
by which he thinks that possibly the indivisible integrity of 



METAPHYSICS 245 

But another thing is clear. Plato did not for 
a moment admit that this logic, however rigor- 
ously conducted, rendered the doctrine of Ideas 
in itself untenable. As we have seen, he con- 
tinued to adhere to the doctrine in his later works, 
and, more than that, this very Dialogue contains 
direct statements of his adherence. The strong- 
est of these is in the words of Parmenides him- 
self, where, at the close of the discussion which 
has driven Socrates point by point to a complete 
silence, he asks what is to be done about philo- issb 
sophy if we surrender our belief in Ideas, or 
whither we shall turn our minds, or, indeed, how 
we shall be able to converse at all. 

Such a passage ought to be suflScient in itself 

the Idea may be reconciled with its presence in the multi- 
plicity of objects which partake of its nature: "Just as day, 
being one and the same, is simultaneously present in many 
places yet is not separate from itself [that is, does not lose 
its integrity by being among the events of time], so each 
Idea might be in all things yet remain one and the same" 
(131b). Instead of replying to this argument, Parmenides 
shifts the comparison to a tent spread over a number of 
men; in which case not the whole tent but only a portion 
of it should properly be said to be over each man. Did 
Plato himself fail to see that by shifting the simile from 
time to place he was leaving the real point untouched, or 
did he perceive the difficulty of determining the nature of 
time itself, whether it has any objective reality, and so 
shrink from a discussion which would have been out of all 
proportion to the scope of the Dialogue? All the difficul- 
ties raised by Parmenides involve the conception of Ideas 
as in space. Can a metaphysical psychology avoid this 
fallacy ? 



M6 PLATONISM 

to refute those who find in the Parmenides any 
surrender of the distinctly Platonic doctrine of 
Ideas, but its force and emphasis are doubled 
when we remember that it does not stand alone, 
but is a repetition of — rather a brief reference to 
— Plato's constant argument against the anti- 
idealists of the Heraclitean and Protagorean 
school. This point is important enough in itself 
and in its bearing on the place of the Parmenides 
in the whole drift of Plato's metaphysical period 
to warrant us in pausing a moment to consider 
such a passage as the close of the Cratylus, The 
bulk of this Dialogue is given up to a series of 
linguistic puzzles which have been one of the 
bugbears of Platonic students. Many of the 
derivations suggested by Plato are so absurdly 
extravagant as to force the conclusion that he 
was ridiculing the pretensions of certain etymo- 
logists of the age; yet others, again, seem to be 
advanced quite soberly by him, and the reader is 
left with no criterion to distinguish between 
satire and serious exposition. This bewildering 
medley of fun and earnestness is not absent in 
other Dialogues; is indeed one of the marks of 
the Platonic method. But whatever Plato's atti- 
tude may have been towards the legitimacy or 
illegitimacy of the current etymological science 
of the day, he seems to have felt that the Hera- 
clitean notion of the flux was natural to the un- 
reflecting mass of men and was deeply imbedded 



METAPHYSICS Ml 

in the elementary substance of language. Any 
seeker for the truth, therefore, must free his mind 
from the implications of common speech and 
train himself to look at things as they are. The 
fact is, says Socrates at the close of his discus- 439c s 
sion with the "young" Cratylus, that those who 
gave this colour to language did so, not because 
our world is a huge perpetual flux, but because 
their own minds were revolving dizzily in a sort 
of whirl, into which they had fallen and are 
dragging us after them. The only escape for us 
is not to consider individual objects which may 
be good or beautiful, and the like, and which ap- 
pear to us to be continually changing, but to fix 
our minds on Ideas, such as the good itself, the 
beautiful itself. For how can we even give a 
name to a thing which is now this and now that, 
always altering, and slipping away from us at 
the very moment we are speaking of it? There 
is no knowledge of such a thing; for just when 
you are going to know it, off it goes into some- 
thing else, so that you have no chance to learn 
what it is or what quahties it has. There isn't 
any knowledge — ^nothing to be known and no 
one to know, if all things are in this state of un- 
ceasing flux. Granted the faculty of knowledge 
in us, then there must be something for it to 
know; then there must be those Ideas of good- 
ness itself and beauty itself, and the hke, which 
do not belong to the cosmic stream and whirl. 



248 PLATONISM 

It may be hard to decide between the truth of 
these Ideas and what the Heraehteans and 
Protagoreans and all the rest of them believe, 
but certainly he is a pretty poor creature who 
will permit the life of his soul to be determined 
by the mere implications of common speech, and 
will ignorantly assert that there is nothing sound 
in the universe but that the whole thing is a sort 
of leaky vessel continually at drip. How would 
he differ from a man who was suffering from a 
rheum, and was convinced accordingly that the 
whole world was in a state of rheumy fluction? 
You at least, Cratylus, are still young, and 
ought not to accept these current theories out of 
hand, but should investigate them bravely and 
honestly. 

Now there can be no doubt that the brief ex- 
hortation to the "young" Socrates was written 
in the same tone and to the same general end as 
that to the "young" Cratylus. The interpreta- 
tion of the Parmenides thus depends on the solu- 
tion of this crux: we have the whole doctrine of 
Ideas subjected to a process of destructive logic 
to which Plato makes no direct answer either 
here or anywhere else in his writings, and by the 
side of this we have an unwavering statement of 
the reahty and vital importance of Ideas. Given 
this dilemma the only way of escape would seem 
to be through holding that Ideas do not come to 
us by a process of metaphysical logic, but by 



METAPHYSICS 249 

means of some direct experience independent of 
such logic, and that the method of reasoning em- 
ployed against them by Parmenides, while per- 
fectly soimd in itself, is all in vacuo, so to speak, 
and has no bearing upon their existence or non- 
existence. No other interpretation would ap- 
pear to be tenable, and as a matter of fact the 
second, and larger, part of the Dialogue is di- 
rected to exhibiting the limitations, and the use- 
fulness within these limitations, of what I have 
called the process of metaphysical logic. To un- 
derstand this point we must look a little more 
closely into the antecedents and structure of the 
Dialogue. 

Parmenides, the principal speaker of the Dia- 
logue which bears his name, was the pre-Socratic 
philosopher from whom more than from any 
other, unless it be Pythagoras, Plato's thoughts 
received their colour. His name sounded to 
Plato out of antiquity with peculiar awfulness, 
and even when disagreeing with him the yoimger ^^t3E^*''^ 
man could not forget his veneration. Against 
all the other philosophers, from Homer down, 
who had seen in the world only the play of flux 
and perpetual mutation, Parmenides stood forth 
in lonely grandeur, a man, in the Homeric 
phrase, "reverend and dreadful," a sage able to 
impress Socrates with "the noble depth of his 
mind." In Elea of Magna Graecia he had set 
up a school in direct opposition — so it seemed at 



250 PLATONISM 

least to Plato and the later men — ^to that of 
Heraclitus. In his cosmic poem he represents 
himself as carried by the Smi-maidens up to the 
Gate of Night and Day, which is opened to him 
by the goddess Dike (Right, Justice), and there 
in the realm of heavenly light he is instructed in 
the difference between truth and deceptive opin- 
ion. The whole vision was to be taken over by 
Plato in The Republic when searching for the 
nature of justice, and worked up into his sublime 
comparison of the supreme good in the moral 
sphere with the light-giving sun in the physical 
sky. And the truth as Parmenides saw it was 
one aspect, incomplete and therefore partly false, 
of what Plato was to hold. Our opinion of the 
world of change and appearance is a mere decep- 
tion; rather, such a world is not, for the reality 
of being is the reality of thought, or knowledge, 
one and indivisible, without beginning or end, 
without growth or decay, finite in itself and with 
nothing beyond it, with no colour or motion or 
quality of perception. The universe of Parme- 
nides was the pantheism of his predecessor Xeno- 
phanes, but as it would be expressed by an intui- 
tive philosopher instead of a religious dreamer. 

Now it was inevitable that this one-sided per- 
ception, or intuition, of the unity underlying all 
things should have been met with ridicule on the 
part of those who could see nothing but the world 
of flux, and it became necessary for the Eleatic 



METAPHYSICS 251 

pupils of Parmenides to support their master by 
means of whatever logical instrimaent they could 
lay hands on. The shrewdest of these defenders 
was Zeno, who sought to discomfit the enemy by 
bringing confusion into their own camp. The 
HeracHteans had undertaken to dispose of the 
Eleatic unity by showing the absurdity of a 
theory which, by its maintenance of indivisibility, 
involved the denial of our common perceptions 
of motion and change, and by its insistence on 
absolute uniformity, involved the denial of all 
qualities to things, thus reducing the mind to a 
state of complete negation. Zeno did not, in- 
deed could not, answer these criticisms directly, 
but he did undertake to strengthen the Parmeni- 
dean position by setting forth the equal absurdi- 
ties that followed if we rejected imity and made 
multiplicity the essence of all things. One of his 
argimaents was the famous riddle of Achilles and 
the tortoise. Suppose Achilles, who runs ten 
times faster than the tortoise, tries to catch a 
tortoise that has a start of ten feet. By the time 
he has traversed these ten feet, the tortoise will 
be one foot in advance. When he has traversed 
this foot, the tortoise will be a tenth of a foot in 
advance ; and so on ad infinitum. That is to say, 
on the assumption that time and space are di- 
visible this division will proceed without end, and 
Achilles never can overtake the tortoise; which 
is absurd on the face of it. Another argument 



252, PLATONISM 

of Zeno's turned on the contradictions that must 
arise from the ascription of quahties to things. 
For instance, if you say that A is like B, this will 
imply that A is unlike something else, so that 
you are driven to the paradox of holding that A 
is at the same time like and unlike ; which, again, 
is absurd. 

All this, of course, might be waved aside as 
an amusing play of logomachy, but in fact it in- 
troduced a real evil into the life of a people who 
were already prone by nature to lose themselves 
in linguistic subtleties and to prize sheer clever- 
ness above simple veracity. Instead of throw- 
ing up the whole game the Heracliteans answered 
Zeno in kind, while on the other hand the Megar- 
ian school of Euclides took up the cudgels for 
the Eleatics and carried their logic to the ex- 
treme of fatuity. Hence arose that art of eristic 
which threatened for a while to reduce the whole 
of Greek philosophy to a vain babble of conten- 
tious words. The very essence of eristic, it will 
be seen, lies in the metaphysical use of reason, or 
logic, without regard for, or in flat contradic- 
tion to, the facts of experience and intuition. By 
the time of Plato's maturity these successors of 
the sophists were expending their strength in 
ever vainer and more perplexing enigmas, while 
of the sincere aspiration after the truth it might 
be said, 

"Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy!" 



METAPHYSICS 253 

The wrangle had spread until it embraced Plato's 
own doctrine of Ideas, which hitherto he had held 
rather as a matter of intuition and as an unques- 
tioned necessity of the imagination than as a 
reasoned conviction, and was forcing him in self- 
defence into what may be called his metaphysical 
period. 

One of his aims at this time, perhaps his chief 
aim, was to expose the vanity of the new form of 
sophistry — for it was at bottom precisely the 
same spirit as that which he had opposed in his 
earher Dialogues, but disguised now in the sober 
garb of metaphysics — and in its place to estab- 
lish the true dialectic, that is to say the general- 
izing ascent of the reason without losing from 
sight, indeed by using as its firm stepping-stones, 
those innate perceptions of moral and aesthetic 
consequences which he had hypostatized as Ideas. 
Already, in The Republic, he had expressed his 4S4a 
scorn of those who, by reason of their inabihty to 
distinguish Ideas, gave themselves up to the pur- 
suit of verbal oppositions, thinking they were 
practising dialectic, or the true philosophical dis- 
course, when in fact they were indulging in mere 
eristic. In his systematic exposition of this evil, 
the first task would be to bring into the hght the 
Ivu'king absurdities of the Herachtean meta- 
physic of the flux ; this he had done in the Craty- 
lus, Euthydemus, and Theaetetus with a drastic 
power in comparison with which the campaign 



254 PLATONISM 

of Zeno and the other Eleatics was mere child's 
play. Now, in the Parmenides, he would employ 
the same weapon, only with greater respect for 
the persons concerned, against the Eleatics and 
Megarians, and at the same time would investi- 
gate the vahdity and scope of the whole meta- 
physical, eristic method. 

For this purpose he took advantage of the oc- 
casion when the aged Parmenides had visited 
Athens with his pupil Zeno, and had there met 
and talked with Socrates, then a "very young 
man." There are, I know, difficulties in the way 
of accepting this meeting as historical, but Plato 
mentions it so often, and in such a manner, that 
we are almost bound to regard it not only as a 
fact but as one to which Socrates was fond of 
alluding. That, however, is unessential. Whe- 
ther as a fact or fiction, we are told in the Par- 
menides that Zeno has been reading those treat- 
ises of his in which, as I have said, he undertook 
to support the Parmenidean unity by showing 
that the multiplicity assumed in its place by the 
Heracliteans led to even greater paradoxes. So- 
crates listens attentively, grasps the point of the 
argimient, but has a modest question to ask. I 
see, he says, that material phenomena are at the 
same time both one and many ; for instance I, as 
I stand here, am one if I am taken as a separate 
integral member of this group of men, but I am 
many if you consider me as composed of parts, 



METAPHYSICS 255 

right and left, upper and lower. I can under- 
stand how your logic by laying hold of these 
contraries will reduce our reason to a paradoxi- 
cal impasse. That seems easy enough if you 
start with material phenomena. But I should 
like to hear how you would apply this process to 
Ideas. What, exclaims Parmenides, with con- 
cealed pleasure, wishing to bring out his clever 
young questioner, do you believe in these Ideas 
as real things having an existence apart from 
phenomena? Whereupon follows the famous 
attack on the doctrine, which turns on the diifi- 
culty of comprehending how an Idea can be im- 
manent in the many particular phenomena which 
bear its name without losing its integral unity, or 
how phenomena can participate in the Idea with- 
out forgoing their character of changing multi- 
plicity. Socrates is completely blocked in all his 
efforts to explain away this difficulty — indeed 
neither Plato nor any one else has ever found a 
positive solution of the paradox — and is ready 
to throw up his position as untenable ; when Par- 
menides checks him. No, says the old warrior, 
you cannot do that, for without Ideas you are 
confronted by a still more disastrous paradox; 
unless these generalizations of the mind corre- 
spond to things in some way really existent there 
can be no philosophy, no knowledge, no meaning 
at all in conversation. You yourself have de- 
clared that the logic of Zeno did not touch the 



ft56 PLATONISM 

simple fact of experience which presents phe- 
nomena to us as at the same time both one and 
many, and you need only carry the method out to 
its legitimate end to discover that it will leave 
you in possession also of your intuitive belief in 
the parallel existence of Ideas and phenomena. 
Then, after some hesitation, Parmenides is per- 
suaded to give an illustration of this self-denying 
use of eristic. Now it should be observed here 
that this interpretation of the first part of the 
Dialogue — in itself the only one which does not 
do violence to the plain sense of the text — avoids 
the absurdity of supposing that Plato would have 
selected Socrates for the spokesman of a theory 
he meant to denounce. To represent Socrates, 
when "very young," as not yet competent to 
maintain his position with the full mastery of 
dialectic is quite another matter, and is in perfect 
conformity with Plato's own transition, not from 
one philosophy to another, but from what may be 
called his purely intuitional period to the years 
of metaphysical examination into his creed. 

As for Parmenides' eristical exhibition, which 
forms the second part of the Dialogue, it is just 
one of the terrible things of philosophy; heaven 
^^J^;^"^*^^' forbid that I should ask my reader "to swim 
through such and so great a sea of words." But 
without a glance at the main points of the dis- 
cussion we cannot assure ourselves of the general 
purport of this Dialogue or understand the drift 
of the Dialogues that follow. 



METAPHYSICS 257 

Parmenides, then, condescends to submit his 
own doctrine of the One as a corpus vile to be 
tried out by this eristical method. He will first 
take the statement that the One is and trace the 
consequences, and will afterwards deal in the 
same way with the contrary statement that the 
One is not. The argument thus drags its awful 
length through these eight hypotheses (I alter 
their order as noted) : 

A (This stands first in the Dialogue) : The 
One is posited as absolute and indivisible. It fol- 
lows from this hypothesis that the One is devoid 
of all qualities, incapable of being known or in 
any way considered or named or uttered. 

B ( Second in the Dialogue) : But by the very 
hypothesis that the One is we attribute being to 
it. Thus the One is presented as a duality of 
unity and being; this duality is subject to further 
division, and the One becomes endlessly divisible 
and possessed of infinite qualities. But to say 
that it possesses every possible pair of contrary 
qualities is the same as to say that it has no quali- 
ties ; and we are reduced to a similar absurdity. 

Now let us consider the consequences of this 
hypothesis for the Many {ta alia, that is, the Oth- 
ers, all things conceivable besides the One) : 

C (Fourth in the Dialogue) : If the Many 
are taken as having no participation in the One, 
i.e., as absolute multiplicity, it follows that, like 
the One of A, they will have no qualities at all, 
and are utterly inconceivable. 



258 PLATONISM 

D (Third in the Dialogue) : If the Many 
participate in the One, then, like the One of B, 
they will have all contrary qualities, which is 
equally repugnant to reason. 

So far we have been arguing on the supposi- 
tion that the One is ; now let us take the contrary 
supposition that the One is not: 

E ( Sixth in the Dialogue) : If the One is not, 
regarded absolutely, we get the same total nega- 
tion as in A. 

F (Fifth in the Dialogue) : But by the very 
hypothesis that the One is not we associate being 
with it. To say that the One is not is a different 
thing from saying that the Not- One is not, and 
in this way altereity, the property of difference, 
is brought into the Not-One, and the Not-One 
(like the One in hypothesis B) becomes possessed 
of all different qualities. (This hypothesis, it 
should be noted, is in metaphysical form the old 
thesis which Plato had wrestled with in earlier 
Dialogues and was to discuss at length in the 
Sophist, that there is no such thing as a false 
statement, for the reason that it is impossible to 
speak what is not.) 

G (Eighth in the Dialogue) : If we take the 
One as not being absolutely, it follows that the 
Many will have no qualities at all and there is 
nothing. 

H (Seventh in the Dialogue) : If the One is 
not but the Many are, it follows that, by seeming 
to be composed of units, the Many will have all 
contrary qualities. 



METAPHYSICS 259 

Now, there are two ways of looking at these 
hypotheses. According to most of the interpre- 
ters one set (A, C, E, G) is meant to show the 
impossibiHty of positing an absolute One apart 
from the Many, whereas another set (B, D, F, 
H) demonstrates the reconciliation of the One 
and the Many. Thus hypothesis A leads to a 
total negation, whereas hypothesis B, by recon- 
ciling the One and the Many, leads to the possi- 
bility of predication and corresponds with actual 
experience. The whole argument, in a word, is 
a continuation of the assault on the doctrine of 
Ideas as entities of real existence apart from 
phenomena (chdrista) , and a proof that, by some 
theory of conceptualism or the like, they are in 
and of the Many. 

The other way of interpreting the argument 
is to accept all the hypotheses as resulting equally 
in an impasse, since it is just as absurd to say that 
a thesis leads to the simultaneous possession of 
all contrary qualities as to say that it leads to the 
total negation of qualities. And this in my judg- 
ment, as my wording of the summaries above will 
have made evident, is the only interpretation the 
language of Plato will bear. Of course, if you 
care to do violence to the text, you may get any 
meaning out of it you choose; and that capable 
scholars are not above using violence can be 
shown from a shining example. After deducing 
from the second hypothesis the possibility of at- 



260 PLATONISM 

tributing all qualities to the One, Plato adds a 
corollary in which, by a subtle analysis of the time 
element, he shows how this is the same as saying 
that the One would have no qualities. Very 
good. But how does Professor Burnet in his 
summary of the hypotheses deal with this double- 
edged argument? He states the conclusion of 
the hypothesis proper thus : 

"Therefore One partakes of past, present, and 
future; it was, it is, it will be; it has become, is 
becoming, and will become. It can be the object 
of knowledge, judgment, and sensation; it can 
be named and spoken of."^^ 

That is as close to the Greek as need be; but 
turn now to his statement of the conclusion of 
the corollary: 

"It is the instantaneous which makes all 
changes from one opposite to another possible, 
and it is in the instant of change that what 
changes has neither the one nor the other of its 
opposite qualities. "^^ 

Compare this with the Greek which is literally 
as follows: 

"By the same token it [the One], passing from 
one to many and from many to one, is neither 
one nor many, is neither divided nor combined. 
And, passing from like to unlike and from un- 
like to like, it is neither like nor unlike, neither 
made like nor made unlike; and, passing from 

^^ Greek Philosophy, Part I, p. 268. 
12 Ibid. 



METAPHYSICS 261 

small to large and to equal and to the opposites, 
it would be neither small nor large nor equal, 
neither increased nor diminished nor made 
equal." 

Is it too much to say that, by transposing this 
statement from its negative to a positive form, 
Burnet has come pretty close to betraying his 
author? The case is still worse with a critic like 
Natorp, who out of an argument ending thus in 
complete negation draws a positive meaning such 
as this: 

"By the instrumentality of continuity, as we 
may now put it briefly, the way is prepared for 
a reconciliation between the absolute position 
(the thesis) and the relative (the antithesis). 
The possibility is opened for the passage of the 
absolute position into relativity, that is to say, 
for the passage of the Idea, first conceived as 
pure thought, the a priori, into experience, which 
means the realm of relativity. The first founda- 
tion is laid for the possibility of experience as 
methodically assured knowledge."^^ 

There is not a hint of all this in Plato; it is 
Kant or Hegel or Natorp. The conclusions of 
the second hypothesis and of its corollary ought 
to be enough in themselves to show that no such 
inference can be drawn. But to clinch the fact, 

^* Plato's Ideenlehre, p. 256. — How describe this typical 
product of modern Platonic scholarship? If I dared express 
my real feeling, I should say that, beneath its imposing 
armour of technical jargon, the book was a nightmare of 
niaiseries. 



262 PLATONISM 

the whole Dialogue ends sharply with this 
formidable summary: "Thus, it seems, whether 
One is or is not, both it and the Many, regarded 
both in themselves and in relation to each other, 
all in every way both are and are not, both have 
appearance and have not." How a scholar can 
have this consummation before his eyes and yet 
fail to see that all the eight hypotheses must be 
taken without distinction as reductions to the 
absurd, is beyond my comprehension. 

Certain owlish persons who are aware of this 
consequence have worried themselves over the 
method by which it was obtained. It is full of 
fallacies and false reasoning, exclaims Apelt,^"^ 
and will waive the whole thing as a piece of 
youthful indiscretion. Fallacies, quotha! It is 
indeed an arsenal of fallacies; rather, it is the 
fundamental fallacy of metaphysics from the be- 
ginning until now, stripped of its garb of irrele- 
vant truths and laid bare to the gaze of any who 
will see. For I take it that any metaphysic 
which attempts to give an account of the ulti- 
mate nature of things, the rerum natura, by the 
process of pure reason will impale itself on one 
or the other horn of this dilemma: either it will 
cling honestly to the absolute One or the absolute 
Many, and so move about in the void, with no 
content of meaning; or it will surreptitiously 

^* "Wahres Arsenal von Erschleichungen und Sophismen," 
Beitrdge, p. 32. 



METAPHYSICS 263 

merge the absolute One in the concrete one or 
the absolute Many in the concrete many, and so 
fall into a dishonest mixture, or "reconciliation," 
of contraries. This is not the place to support 
such a charge by detailed illustrations, but I think 
it would not be hard to show how perfectly the 
error of Spinoza's system is exposed by Plato's 
second hypothesis (B). Compare with the 
working out of that hypothesis Spinoza's effort 
to deduce all the contrary qualities of phenome- 
nal existence from the absolute One: "Transeo 
iam ad ea explicanda, quae ex Dei sive entis 
aeterni et infiniti essentia necessario debuerunt 
sequi: non quidem omnia (infinita enim infinitis 
modis ex ipsa debere sequi) .^^ In like manner 
the scientific conception of a "block universe," 
as an absolute closed system, falls under the third 
hypothesis (D), or, in the Spencerian form of 
the Unknowable and the Knowable, under the 
fourth hypothesis (C). On the other side, the 
various forms of Pragmatism, all the systems 
that accept only the absolute flux, including the 
much-bruited metaphysic of M. Bergson, will 
come within the scope of one or another of the 
four hypotheses that assume the One as not 
being. 

I would not insist on this modern application ; 
but at least I do not see how the second part 
of the Dialogue can be understood otherwise than 

15 Ethics II, Praef. 



ft64i PLATONISM 

as an endeavour to deal in such a manner with 
the metaphysic, or eristic, which had sprung up 
by the side of true philosophy in Plato's own 
day. And the results obtained are of a double 
nature. The first four of the hypotheses discover 
the embarrassment into which those of the Meg- 
arian school were driven who, in fanatical oppo- 
sition to Platonic Ideas and the Heraclitean flux, 
ran to an uncompromising idealism of the One, 
as the exclusive reality. I do not believe that 
Plato meant to direct his argument against the 
Parmenidean unity itself (cf. 128a) ; that unity, 
as the Idea of the Good, was so deeply imbedded 
in his own teleological philosophy that it is im- 
possible to think of him as trying to eradicate it. 
Rather, his aim must have been to tear away 
from this unity the scaffolding which had been 
raised about it by the later Eleatics and Meg- 
arians, and so to leave it in the form of an ob- 
scure intuition, such as it appeared to Parme- 
nides himself, untouched by the rationaUsm 
which would petrify it into a logical negation of 
experience. Even so, it is notable that Plato 
treats this error with a certain respect; at least 
his exposition is conducted without any admix- 
ture of that contemptuous buffoonery which he 
had employed in the Euthydemus, when "dust- 
ing the jackets" of the two shameless Protago- 
reans. He was himself a spiritual child of the 
ancient sage, and thought it almost an act of 



METAPHYSICS ^65 

parricide to lay hands on "father Parmenides." ^JSiJf* 
In this way we can understand the propriety of 
making Parmenides the instrument of attack on 
his Megarian successors. 

But this freeing of the Parmenidean imity 
from its eristical supergrowth was by the way, 
so to speak; the main intention was to bring re- 
lief to Plato's own doctrine of Ideas. At the 
conclusion of the first part of the Dialogue we 
found ourselves confronted by this dilemma: one 
by one the arguments set up to explain the rela- 
tion between Ideas and phenomena had been 
knocked down, yet it was declared impossible to 
surrender Ideas. The situation was very much 
hke that taken by Dr. Johnson (the great So- 
cratic of the modern world) in regard to a ques- 
tion of equal ethical importance: "All theory is 
against the freedom of the will, all experience 
for it." By demonstrating that the eristical 
method led to the same absurdity (and so de- 
stroyed itself) whether we posited the One as 
existing or as not existing, Parmenides would 
intimate to his young friend that to guard him- 
self against a rationahsm which brought out the 
contradictions involved in positing the existence 
of Ideas he should have retorted by forcing his 
antagonist to admit the contradictions involved 
in positing the non-existence of Ideas. Thus he 
would have made himself free to accept the re- 
ality of Ideas as a necessity of inner experience, 



^66 PLATONISM 

just as he had seen that the eristic of Zeno and 
the Herachteans left him free to accept the re- 
ahty of phenomena as known to perception. 

This interpretation of the Parmenides, I sub- 
mit, avoids the violences to the text to which other 
interpretations are bound to have recourse. It 
justifies the choice of speakers, and does away 
with the arbitrary assumption of a radical break 
in Plato's philosophy. It has also the advantage 
of finding a single purpose running through the 
two parts of the discussion, and of establishing 
an integral relation between this Dialogue and 
the others in which Plato turned his attention 
from the sophistry of rhetoric to the sophistry of 
metaphysic. 

If an}^ further confirmation of this thesis is 
needed, it may be found in the natural interpre- 
tation of a much-disputed passage of the Dia- 
logue which is commonly, and rightly, I think, 
regarded as supplementary to the Parmenides. 
In the central part of the Sophist Plato considers 
242c ff in turn three classes of philosophers. First, by 
an argument essentially the same as that em- 
ployed in the Parmenides, he reduces the Eleat- 
ics and Megarians to confusion. He next deals 
with the opposite school, not the mere Heracli- 
teans in this case, but the gross materialists who 
cling to brute sensations and wage war upon the 
246a idealists of all colours, a veritable gigantomachia. 
These, or their kindred at least, he had already 



METAPHYSICS 267 

made the subject of biting ridicule; now he is 
content with what is really little more than a 
reference to the proofs he has elsewhere given at 
length. He argues briefly that there is a soul, 
or life-giving principle in us; that there is a dif- 247b 
ference between the just and the unjust soul; that 
this difference is due to the possession and pres- 
ence of justice or its contrary in the soul, and 
that, therefore, justice itself exists as an invisible, 
impalpable entity — ^that is to say as an Idea. 
After dismissing these two opposed sects, he 
turns to the "friends of Ideas" ; and here the in- 248a 
terpreters run amuck. Campbell, in his note, 
thus states the various positions held : 

"Four possible suppositions remain, if we be- 
heve the dialogues to be the work of Plato. The 
*friends of forms' are either (1) Megarians 
(since Schleiermacher this has been the most 
general impression) ; or (2) Plato himself at an 
earlier stage; or (3) Platonists who have im- 
perfectly understood Plato. The fourth hy- 
pothesis combines (2) and (3)." 

Now, in the name of conscience, why should 
not an imsophisticated reader take these friends 
of forms, or Ideas, to be just Plato and his true 
followers, without any beating about the bush?^^ 

^® Some colour may be lent to Campbell's third supposi- 
tion by the words of 248c (Trpos Srj ravra k, t. A.). They 
may, in fact, point to the overzealousness of Platonists (or 
of Plato himself in his unguarded moments) who held the 
definition of Ideas too rigidly; but the statement of 248a 



teS PLATONISM 

In the first place, as we have seen above, Plato, 
in his contention against the materialists, assumes 
the existence of Ideas in precisely the manner" 
of his early Dialogues. The Sophist^ therefore, 
can scarcely contain a rejection of Ideas, or any 
radical change in the way of regarding them. 
What follows? Plato subjects these ideahsts to 
the antinomies of reason, thus (I borrow Camp- 
belFs own summary) : 

"Perfect Being [the realm of Ideas] cannot be 
in a state of mere negative repose, a sacred form 
without thought, or life, or soul, or motion. . . . 
But on the other hand, thought is equally impos- 
sible without a principle of permanence and rest. 
Hence the philosopher, with whom thought is the 
highest being, can listen wholly neither to the ad- 
vocates of rest nor of motion, but must say with 
the children, that *both are best,' when he is 
defining the nature of Being." 

We have, then, in this section of the Sophist 
an exact repetition in brief of the method em- 
ployed in the second part of the Parmenides, ap- 
plied now directly to the doctrine of Ideas. And 
observe that the conclusion is in no sense of the 
word a "reconciliation" of rest and motion, the 
One and the Many, nor is it in any sense a de- 

(koi o-w/iart k. t. A.) is so perfectly in accord with Plato's 
position in the Timaeus and elsewhere as to leave room for 
no doubts of the nature of these "friends of Ideas." It is 
to be noted that the exposition of the theory comes from 
the mouth of an Eleatic. 
^^ *'Ej€t Kal TTopovaiq., 



METAPHYSICS 269 

termination of the relationship of Ideas to phe- 
nomena, but a categorical statement that Ideas 
are and that in some unknown way they show the 
effects of their power in the realm of multipUcity 
and change.^^ The destruction of eristic and 
metaphysical assumption by means of an imwav- 
ering affirmation of the reaUty of moral Ideas, 
united with an unwavering scepticism, is Plato's 
philosophical justification of his master's life and 
faith. 

But candour forbids us to stop here. Though 
this is the significant outcome of Plato's later 
thought, it is clear that, for a while at least, he 
was haimted by the hope of attaining to some 
discursive proof of those Ideas the existence of 
which could only not be disproved by the false 
methods of eristic, and to some rational explana- 
tion of the inherence of these Ideas in phe- 
nomena. There are tentative efforts to create 
this positive metaphysic in the Sophist and the 
Philehus, but it should appear that the full work- 
ing out of the plan was left for the projected 
Dialogue on the Philosopher, The absence of sopust 2S3c 
that work from the Platonic canon means, I con- 
jecture, simply this, that Plato became aware of 
his inabiUty to achieve what, indeed, no philo- 
sopher has ever achieved; since it Hes beyond the 
scope of human reason. 

^® The key note to the Sophist is struck in the word 
8Lr)7roprjfi€vov (250e), "we have seen the difficulties through 
to the end/* 



Republic 486a 



CHAPTER IX 



CONCLUSION 



Granted that Platonism has been expounded 
correctly in the foregoing chapters, the question 
remains — a very grave question — whether its in- 
fluence has been on the whole for good or for evil. 
The extent of this influence no one, I think, will 
deny. As a dominant factor in the formation of 
the Christian religion it has helped to mould the 
civilization of the western world, and as a philo- 
sophy in its own right it has been the inspiration 
of innumerable poets and prophets who have 
called upon men to rise above ephemeral interests 
to the contemplation of all time and all being. 
In a manner not given to any other writer Plato 
must be regarded as the liberator of the spirit, 
who has set wings to the human soul and sent it 
voyaging through the empyrean. But in that 
flight how many have mounted too near the sun, 
and fallen to earth in ruinous combustion ! How 
many others have forever lost their way in those 
thin heights ! Alas, for the weakness of mankind, 
and their "blind hopes" ! It is a fact, sad and in- 
disputable, that no one is more hkely to call him- 
self, or to be called by his admirers, a Platonist 

2T0 



CONCLUSION ni 

than the reformer with a futile scheme for the 
regeneration of the world, or the dreamer who 
has spurned the realities of human nature for 
some illusion of easy perfection, or the romantic 
visionary who has set the spontaneity of fancy 
above the rational imagination, or the "fair soul" 
who has withdrawn from the conflict of life into 
the indulgence of a morbid introspection, or the 
votary of faith as a law abrogating the sterner 
law of works and retribution. Half the enthusi- 
asts and inspired maniacs of society have shielded 
themselves under the aegis of the great Athenian. 
Not to mention the detected mountebanks, the 
list is replete with the names of accepted sages 
whose wisdom, if brought to the test, would prove 
to be only a finer form of spiritual flattery. 

If these are the only products of Platonism, 
then it is a pity the works of Plato were not lost 
altogether, with the books of so many other an- 
cient philosophers, and we who busy ourselves 
with interpreting the Dialogues are merely add- 
ing to the sum of the world's folly. But it is 
not so. It is with Platonism as with Christianity 
and every other strong excitement of the human 
heart. Liberty is the noblest and at the same 
time the most perilous possession that can be 
given to mankind; and, unless we are prepared 
to silence the higher call of religion and philo- 
sophy altogether for the safer demands of a pure- 
ly practical wisdom, we must expect, while we try 



272 PLATONISM 

to expose, these vagaries of minds made drmik 
with excess of enthusiasm. No, we dare not re- 
pudiate Platonism for the dangers that surround 
it; but it is well that we should be put on our 
guard against Platonists, remembering the ad- 
monition of St. John to the disciples of Christ: 
"Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits 
whether they are of God, because many false 
prophets are gone out into the world." 

We have already had occasion to distinguish 
between the true and the false Platonist in the 
realms of art and science; but there is need of a 
single general criterion which can be applied to 
every pretender to the name, and such a criterion, 
happily, is not far to seek. Both the true and 
the false Platonist appear with the promise of 
regeneration in their hands, stimulating the im- 
agination to roam in unbounded and unfamiliar 
fields, loosing the soul from the prison-house of 
convention, pointing to a prize beyond the re- 
wards of commonplace prudence. But there is 
this certain difference between them. To the 
true Platonist the divine spirit, though it may be 
called, and is, the hidden source of beauty and 
order and joy, yet always, when it speaks di- 
rectly in the human breast, makes itself heard as 
an inhibition; like the guide of Socrates, it never 
in its own proper voice commands to do, but only 
to refrain. Whereas to the pseudo-Platonist it 
appears as a positive inspiration, saying yes to 



CONCLUSION «73 

s desires and emotions. Goethe unwittingly 
was giving expression to the everlasting formula 
of pseudo-Platonism when he put into the mouth 
of Mephistopheles the fateful words: "I am the 
spirit that ever denies." It is God that denies, 
not Satan. The moment these terms are re- 
versed, what is reverenced as the spirit becomes a 
snare instead of a monitor: hberty is turned into 
license, a glamour of sanctity is thrown over the 
desires of the heart, the humility of doubt goes 
out of the mind, the will to follow this or that im- 
pulsion is invested with divine authority, there is 
an utter confusion of the higher and the lower 
elements of our nature. 

This longing for the assiu'ance of faith without 
the humbling bondage of scepticism extends, of 
course, far beyond the sphere of pseudo-Platon- 
ism, and has been the ever-present temptation of 
those strong men, of whatever professed creed, 
who have laid violent hands on rehgion and philo- 
sophy. Here is the origin of those enthusiasms 
and extravagances of inner freedom which are 
constantly rising to trouble the world by making 
an unholy divorce between supposed inspiration 
and common sense, sometimes between supposed 
inspiration and common morality. The mani- 
festations of fanaticism may be various, in ac- 
cordance with the disposition of the man or 
group of men upon whom the temptation falls, 
but the ultimate cause is always the same: it is 



274 PLATONISM 

the lust of the heart to identify our personal in- 
clinations with the voice of God or with some di- 
vine authority. In religion this spirit is seen at 
work in the pride of the ascetic — "the hair shirt, 
the watchings, the midnight prayers, the obmut- 
escence, the gloom and mortification of religious 
orders, and of those who aspired to religious per- 
fection," as Paley says/ For the ascetic is 
simply the man who translates the inhibitions of 
the spirit into a positive law of physical discom- 
fort. From the same source came the lust of 
persecution into the Catholic church, leading a 
man like Torquemada to believe that his passion 
for dominance was the divine will ; and the equal 
intolerance and inhumanity of the Puritans, who, 
as was charged by the writer of a tract in 1676, 
held that "the Holy Spirit directs and persuades 
men what to believe and do [note the affirmation] 
by his immediate working." It was not without 
reason that South could say they fetched "a war- 
rant for all their villainies from ecstasy and in- 
spiration." There was needed the whole revul- 
sion of the eighteenth century to "cast enthusiasm 
out of divinity," to use Bishop Sprat's strong 
phrase — the pity being that so much of the true 
inspiration had to be ejected with the false. 
Turn again to Paley, the apostle of common 
sense in religion, if not of common sense at the 
expense of religion, and hear his measured rebuke 

^ Evidences II, ii. 2. 



CONCLUSION 276 

of the wild language of the sectarian who cher- 
ishes the emotions attendant upon so-called "con- 
version" and "rebirth" as evidences of sanctifica- 
tion: "Our Saviour uttered no impassioned de- 
votion. There was no heat in his piety, or in the 
language in which he expressed it; no vehement 
or rapturous ejaculations, no violent urgency, in 
his prayers. ... I feel a respect for Methodists, 
because I believe that there is to be found 
amongst them much sincere piety, and availing, 
though not always well-informed, Christianity: 
yet I never attended a meeting of theirs, but I 
came away with the reflection, how different what 
I heard was from what I read! I do not mean in 
doctrine, with which at present I have no con- 
cern, but in manner ; how different from the calm- 
ness, the sobriety, the good sense, and I may add, 
the strength and authority, of our Lord's dis- 
courses!"^ 

Nor has the evil been less marked in philo- 
sophy than in religion, as he who writes in this 
time of imiversal war can testify with sad con- 
viction. There is a saying of Kant's which is 
much quoted: "Act on a maxim which thou 
canst will to be law imiversal" ; it is the formula 
of his so-called categorical imperative. Well, no 
one would hold Kant directly responsible for the 
calamity to civilization wrought by the European 
War; the causes are manifold and complicated. 

2 Ibid. II, ii, 3, 



276 PLATONISM 

Yet, after all, what is the ambition of Kant's 
people but this maxim in actual operation? For 
the moment you identify the moral sense with 
the human willj as Kant did, and bestow upon 
this will a certainty and authority above the ne- 
gations of pure reason, you are in imminent 
danger, however you may hedge yourself about 
with precautions, of confounding your law uni- 
versal with the libido dominandi and of seeing in 
the categorical imperative an excuse for forcing 
your own sense of right upon reluctant mankind. 
One cannot follow the course of German thought 
from Luther through Kant and Fichte and 
Hegel, through Mommsen and Treitschke and 
others who have justified the aggression of their 
national statecraft, without a growing conviction 
that the boasted idealism of the Teutonic mind, 
if not of the Northern mind generally, has been 
vitiated from the first by an inability to hold the 
will to refrain (if we may so name the daemonic 
check without ourselves suffering the ambiguous 
consequences of the word "will") distinct from 
the will to power.* 

' Paulsen, in his famous commentary, is continually allud- 
ing to the "Platonism" of Kant, yet unwittingly, in passage 
after passage, shows how far Kant's rationalistic (and ut- 
terly inconsistent) dualism is from the ethical dualism of 
Plato, and how easily it slips into a dogmatism of the will. 
"With immediate certainty," he says, "we aflSrm moral good 
as the real purpose of life. We do this, not by means of 
the understanding or scientific thinking, but through the 
will, or, as Kant says, the practical reason. In the fact 



CONCLUSION 277 

These are examples of the evil that fastens 
upon the better part of the soul whenever men 
are tempted to identify spirituality with their 
positive will. The danger of the seduction, 
whether for religion or philosophy, was pointed 
out by Hooker clearly enough in his contention 
with the Puritanic temper of his day. "For my 
purpose herein is to show," he said, "that, when 
the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded 
that it is the will of God to have those things 
done which they fancy, their opinions are as 
thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take 
rest till they have brought their speculations into 
practice. The lets and impediments of which 
practice their restless desire and study to remove 
leadeth them every day forth by the hand into 
other more dangerous opinions, sometimes quite 
and clean contrary to their first pretended mean- 
that the will, which alone judges things as 'good* or *bad/ 
determines morality as that which has absolute worth, we 
have the point of departure for the interpretation of life." 
The result of this he states elsewhere: "Perhaps we may- 
say that there is an inner relationship between Kant's 
ethics and the Prussian nature. The conception of life as 
service, a disposition to order everything according to rule, 
a certain disbelief in human nature, and a kind of lack of 
the natural fulness of life, are traits common to both. It is a 
highly estimable type of human character which here meets 
us, but not a lovable one. It has something cold and severe 
about it that might well degenerate into external perform- 
ance of duty, and hard doctrinaire morality." {Immanuel 
Kant, by Friedrich Paulsen, translated by J. E. Creighton 
and Albert Lefevre, pp. 5 and 54.) 



278 PLATONISM 

ings: so as what will grow out of such errors as 
go masked under the cloak of divine authority, 
impossible it is that ever the wit of man should 
imagine, till time have brought forth the fruits of 
them : for which cause it behoveth wisdom to fear 
the sequels thereof, even beyond all apparent 
cause of fear."* But long before Hooker's day 
the matter was set right by Plato, once for all, in 
the conversation between Socrates and Euthy- 
phro, the prof oundest and most beautiful, I some- 
times think, as well as the most perfectly Socratic 
of the Dialogues. There the fanaticism of a 
young man who has no hesitation in holding his 
own extravagant notion of holy procedure as 
identical with the absolute law of holiness is con- 
trasted with the ironical modesty of Socrates, 
now an old man full of experience, who, never 
doubting the reality of the Idea of holiness as an 
eternal peremptory fact, yet knows that the 
transference of the Idea into the region of spe- 
cific action can be only tentative and subject to 
correction. Those who have understood the 
Euthyphro need read no further to learn the true 
relation between the spiritual affirmation of So- 
crates and Plato and their scepticism. 

Fanaticism, as I have said, is rather contrary 
to Platonism than pseudo-Platonic, and is by no 
means confined to those who pretend to be fol- 
lowers of the Academy. The perversion of those 

^Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface, viii, 2. 



CONCLUSION ^79 

who falsely assume Plato's name more eomjnonly 
takes the guise of an ideahsm in which the softer 
emotions of the soul masquerade as the spirit. In 
this form pseudo-Platonism is almost synony- 
mous with the romantic movement which has 
carried and still carries with it so many of the 
finer minds of the age. For us romanticism seems 
to have begun with the revolt from the narrow re- 
strictions of neo-classical authority in the eight- 
eenth century, but its roots really go back to the 
theosophic speculations of Alexandria. There 
its chief exponent was Plotinus, who took up the 
ancient metaphysical error of Parmenides, and 
sought to re-establish the doctrine of an all- 
embracing unity in place of the irrational dualism 
of the master in whose name he pretended to 
teach. From this unity — to summarize the per- 
plexed inconsistencies of Neoplatonism in the 
briefest terms — the creation of the world was 
supposed to proceed by a series of emanations, 
through intelligence and soul, down to body, or 
material "necessity," which, as the last and re- 
motest offshoot of the divine, was converted 
somehow, in a manner never cleared by Plotinus 
of the obscurity inherent in any monistic system, 
into the cause of evil. This "necessity" of the 
Plotinian metaphysic may seem to have some re- 
semblance to Plato's substratum of the same 
name, but the difference is really fundamental. 
With Plotinus the final "necessity" is not so 



«80 PLATONISM 

much an independent inexplicable force, of which 
the divine government is a negation, as it is a 
vaguely conceived distance from the divine, a 
"deprivation" (steresis) , so to sj^eak. Though at 
times Plotinus falls into the common language of 
the Stoics and sees a shadowy sort of evil in the 
existence of individual souls as a breaking up of 
the supreme unity, at other times he admits a view 
of the world which virtually juggles evil out of it 
altogether. "God made me," he says, speaking 
for the universe, "and I am come from him, per- 
fectly fashioned out of all living beings, sufficing 
and sufficient unto myself, in want of nothing." 
In such a scheme the individual acts in accord- 
ance with the necessity of his nature; "each man 
also does what comes natural to him, and differ- 
ent men do different things." Plotinus was not 
unaware of the deductions that would be drawn 
from such a doctrine: "By saying that there is 
no evil at all in the universe, we perforce do 
away with the good as well, and deny that there 
is any desirable end to be attained." In such a 
conclusion of nihilism Plotinus was unwilling to 
rest, and he twists and struggles to escape the 
net of his own logic ; but if he escapes at all, it is 
only into a kind of etheriahzed naturalism. Let 
us grant that the great Neoplatonist was filled 
with cravings for truth; his doctrine of emana- 
tion and necessity and steresis, none the less, by 
weakening the sense of evil as a positive force, 



CONCLUSION «81 

and by identifying salvation with a surrender of 
the soul to vague yearnings for completion, is 
one of the sources of the endless stream of 
pseudo-Platonism.^ 

First in the list of the modern pseudo-proph- 
ets, the father of all the brood, is Rousseau, who, 
in the words of his latest expositor, "with modi- 
fications due to the influence of Montesquieu," 
remained "essentially a Platonist to the end."^ 
Now, to discover the essential creed of Rousseau 
one need not look far. It is stated explicitly in 
a famous passage of the Nouvelle Helo'ise : "Only 
the souls of fire know how to combat and con- 
quer; all the great achievements, all the sublime 
actions, are their work ; cold reason never has ac- 
complished anything illustrious, and we triumph 
over our passions only by opposing one to an- 
other. When the passion of virtue arises in the 
soul, it dominates alone and holds all in equilib- 
rium." There is, no doubt, a half-truth in such 
words, as there is in all pseudo-Platonism. 
Without the heart, without deep feeling and 
strong desires, it is true that no great work is 
achieved whether for good or for evil; that is the 

^ The quotations here used are taken from The Problem 
of Evil in Plotinus, by B. A. G. Fuller. To that study I 
would refer those who desire to look more thoroughly into a 
subject of great moment which I have been obliged to treat 
in the most summary fashion. 

® C. E. Vaughan, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques 
Rousseau I, 236. 



282 PLATONISM 

49iA ff express doctrine of The Republic, But to look 
for balance in the mere opposition of passion to 
passion, to make morality only one passion 
among many, is to preach a ruinous perversion 
of Platonism. "As for Julie," Rousseau says, 
"who had no rule but her heart, and knew no 
other more sure, she abandoned herself to it 
without scruple, and to do well needed only to 
do what it demanded of her." The philosophy 
of abandonment is not Plato's. It may be that 
of Goethe, the romantic, who, having made 
Mephistopheles the spirit of denial, could put no 
better word for God into the mouth of Faust than 
feeling (Gefiihl), and could discover no better 
use for that feeling than the seduction of an in- 
nocent girl. 

In England we shall find another leader of 
romanticism who is revered by many today as a 
Platonist and as an emancipator of the human 
spirit. The message of Blake is elusively ut- 
tered, but simple enough in itself. It is fairly 
well summed up in his two mythical personifica- 
tions of good and evil, "Emanation" and the 
"Spectre," who play their parts in Milton and 
other of his Prophetic Books. What little Blake 
knew of the Alexandrian philosophers came to 
him at second hand from Jacob Boehme, but his 
principle of goodness is clearly nothing more 
than a personification of that instinct of self-ex- 
pansion in the superessential One which Plotinus 



CONCLUSION 283 

made the cause of the unfolding universe. The 
Emanations, according to Blake, come forth "like 
Females of sweet beauty" ; they are the power of 
the imagination, the perfect spontaneity of de- 
sire, the innocence of imquestioning impulse. 
Against them in each man is set his evil Spectre, 
which is nothing else but the man's own shadow 
regarded as the questioning, limiting, restrain- 
ing reason: 

"They take the Two Contraries which 
are called QuaHties, with which 

Every substance is clothed; they name 
them Good and Evil. 

From them they make an Abstract, 
which is a Negation 

Not only of the Substance from which 
it is derived, 

A murderer of its own Body, but also a 
murderer 

Of every Divine Member. It is the 
Reasoning Power, 

An Abstract objecting power, that neg- 
atives everything. 

This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy 
Reasoning Power, 

And in its Holiness is closed the Abomi- 
nation of Desolation!""^ 

There could not be a more extraordinary 
amalgamation of abstract reason as a process of 
cold logic, such as it had become in the school of 

''Jerusalem f. 10, 11. 8-16. 



284 PLATONISM 

the rationalists and pseudo-classicists, with 
reason as the spiritual inhibition which Socrates 
worshipped in the daemonic check; and both 
forms of reason Blake rejects as the spectral 
abomination. "Jesus," he declares, "was all vir- 
tue, and acted from impulse not from rules." 

Those who care to see the mythology of Blake 
developed in splendid imagery and chains of 
long-drawn sophistry may take up the works of 
Shelley, the purest of the English romantics — a 
Platonist also, as most of his admirers will have 
him. "Under forms of thought derived from the 
atheist and materialist Godwin," we read in one 
of the best informed of living British critics, 
"Shelley has given, in Prometheus Unbound j 
magnificent expression to the faith of Plato and 
of Christ."'— The faith of Plato and of Christ! 
Shall I confess that to meet with such words in 
such a place is to be overborne with the futility 
of writing at all. What shall a Platonist say? 
what shall he not say? The most casual student 
ought to perceive that the ethos of Shelley's 
drama, through its superficial paraphernalia of 
classic and Platonic borrowings, is antipodal to 
true classicism and Platonism. If words mean 
anything the poem breathes the spirit of rebellion 
against the idea of the divine as a restricting, in- 
hibiting power, and is animated by the dream of 

® C. H. Herford, Cambridge History of English Litera- 
ture XII, 74. 



CONCLUSION 285 

deifying the emancipated emotions in its place. 
Here, if anywhere, the voice that denies is evil : 

"Music is in the sea and air, 
Winged clouds soar here and there, 
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of: 
'T is love, all love!" 

(Love, the unconvinced reader must add, which 
does not exclude hatred and bitter intolerance 
of those who have worshipped a different God.) 

These pseudo-Platonists you shall know, then, 
by a single test : they all grasp at the imaginative 
and emotional elements of Platonism, but forget 
that the spiritual affirmation speaks from a dark 
recess of the soul (dark, Plato would say, from 
excess of Hght), in which no image of mortal 
likeness is seen, and into which no positive motive 
can enter. And so you shall find them substi- 
tuting untrammelled spontaneity for centralized 
control, endless expansiveness for obedience to 
the inner check, and an exaggerated sense of 
personal importance for the impersonahty of the 
spirit. They are the sons of Plotinus and citizens 
of Alexandria. 

But if the last word of Platonism viewed from 
the personal side of reason and concupiscence, as 
the last word of all genuine spirituality, is a 
negation, we are not, therefore, to suppose that 
it signifies or commands an impoverishment of 
our human existence. The very contrary of that 
is true. I would not deny that the dualism of 



286 PLATONISM 

body and soul, which Plato apparently took over 
from the old Orphic mysteries, led him at times 
to magnify a pure asceticism, and it is easy to 
see why this aspect of his teaching exercised a 
disproportionate influence in those after ages 
when the world seemed to be breaking up before 
men's eyes and lapsing into its original chaos. 
Indeed, remembering the catalogue of ills, such 
as "to behold desert a beggar bom," which drove 
Shakespeare, the least ascetic of poets, to cry out 
for restful death, and reckoning up the inevitable 
treacheries of hope and the feeble results of en- 
deavour, the sullen antipathies or the light-heart- 
ed indifference of mankind to all that summons 
them out of their ephemeral concerns — reflecting 
on these things, I should not dare to deny that one 
of the just and permanent offices of philosophy 
is to create for the anxious soul a refuge from 
the world. There are times in our day, as there 
were in Plato's, when no other safety or comfort 
seems open to us than the way of flight. I would 
not repudiate the great passage of The Republic 
in which Plato sums up the obstacles confronting 
any one who, living the philosophic hfe, would 
aim to be both in the world and of the world : 

496a "Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disci- 
ples of philosophy will be but a small remnant: 
perchance some noble and well-educated person, 
detained by exile in her service, who in the ab- 
sence of corrupting influences remains devoted to 



CONCLUSION 287 

her; or some lofty soul bom in a mean city, the 
politics of which he contenms and neglects; and 
there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, 
which they justly despise, and come to her; — or 
peradventure there are some who are restrained 
by our friend Theages' bridle; for everything in 
the life of Theages conspired to divert him from 
philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from 
pohtics. My own case of the internal sign is 
hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever, has 
such a monitor been given to any other man. 
Those who belong to this small class have tasted 
how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, 
and have also seen enough of the madness of the 
multitude; and they know that no politician is 
honest, nor is there any champion of justice at 
whose side they may fight and be saved. Such 
a one may be compared to a man who has fallen 
among wild beasts — he will not join in the 
wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able 
singly to resist all their fierce natures, and there- 
fore seeing that he would be of no use to the 
State or to his friends, and reflecting that he 
would have to throw away his hf e without doing 
any good either to himself or others, he holds his 
peace, and goes his own way. He is like one 
who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the 
driving wind hurries along, retires under the 
shelter of a wall ; and seeing the rest of mankind 
full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can 
live his own life and be pure from evil or un- 
righteousness, and depart in peace and good- 
will, with bright hopes." (Jowett's translation.) 



«88 PLATONISM 

These are the moments when, looking out on 
the futihty of all things human, we say that the 
Poiiticus 272E great pilot himself, having dropped the helm 
from his hands, has retired apart into his watch- 
tower and left the world to be rolled backward in 
its course by its own fated and innate desire. 
Such moments of dejection will come to every 
thinking man, and for these too philosophy has 
its healing mission. And when the hour of part- 
ing is at hand and the work of life is accom- 
plished, as on that day in the Athenian gaol when 
Socrates was talking for the last time with his 
friends and disciples, then, also, philosophy will 
appear as a study of death and a long prepara- 
tion for surrender of the concerns of this earth. 

But that is not the characteristic note of Plato, 
nor the aspect of philosophy on which it is well to 
gaze overmuch. Rather, we should dwell on the 
fulness of existence that belongs by right to him 
who has overcome himself. No one, I think, can 
read the Dialogues without being impressed 
above all by the broad sanity of the life they in- 
culcate and display. It would require a whole 
book to exhibit this truth in detail, but some no- 
tion of its scope can be obtained by taking a few 
sentences from a Dialogue in which, from the 
nature of the subject, one would least expect to 
meet with these practical uses of philosophy. If, 
caught by the occasional note of asceticism, any 
one beUeves that Plato's teaching is contrary to 



CONCLUSION 289 

the maxim of a somid mind in a somid body, he 
need not study the book of The Republic which 
deals at length with physical training as a prepa- 
ration for the higher education, but may find the 
doctrine stated with sufiicient explicitness in a 
few passing words of the Timaeus, "All that is 87c 
good is fair," it is there said, "and the fair can- 
not be lacking in proportion." Hence the sound 
man will not suffer his intelligence to grow at 
the expense of his physical strength — "the soul 
must not be exercised to the neglect of the body, 
nor the body to the neglect of the soul, in order 
that, being a match for each other, they may at- 
tain balance and health." That is the founda- 
tion, but beyond this the whole tenor of the Dia- 
logue is a witness to Plato's interest in the play 
of the intellect for its own sake. Particularly in 
the large observations of natural law he sees a 
field of endless and elevated activity; "for," he 59c 
says, "if we pursue these as a source of recrea- 
tion, not forgetting the principle of eternal being 
but gaining from the plausible theories of phe- 
nomena a pleasure free of remorse, we may create 
for ourselves a sober and intelligent entertain- 
ment for life." 

Nor does the concern of the philosopher end 
with the exercise of the body and the understand- 
ing ; the arts, too, will be included in his purview, 
and his will be the genuine love of beauty. 
Whether his interest is in mathematics, or in any ssc 



290 PLATONISM 

other intellectual pursuit, he will, if he is rightly 
to be called a cultivated man, apply himself to 
80b the arts — not, indeed, as do the common run of 
the thoughtless, who seek for pleasure only in 
lovely forms or in the concourse of sweet sounds, 
but after the manner of those wiser men who find 
happiness from the imitation of the divine har- 
mony in mortal motions. Thus, as Plato says 
Republic 549b elscwherc, philosophy is reason tempered by 
music, the best guardian and saviour of the soul, 
which alone, if it is born in man, is able to pre- 
serve him in virtue to the end. 

Yet there is also in these studies a higher aim 
than the immediate gratification and safety they 
offer. Does any one suppose that he shall reach 
up forthright to the assurance of spiritual intui- 
tion, without the discipline which comes from ex- 
erting the brain in the lower sphere of know- 
ledge, or that his eyes shall see God before they 
have learned to look with sympathetic interest 
upon the ordered expanse of creation, or that he 
shall taste the mystery of eternity when he has 
never cared to acquire the long lessons of time? 
Possibly for some men this brief and unlaborious 
path to the summit may lie open; but they will 
not find it indicated in Plato. 

Philosophy, as Plato expoimded it in the 
groves of the Academy, was thus the fulness of 
life, moving ever to higher and richer planes of 
knowledge and feeling. Yet it was a life, also, 



CONCLUSION 291 

conditioned by the moral law, consciously present 
as an inner check setting limits to the grasp of 
reason, staying the flow of desires, governing the 
imagination, bringing not stagnation and death, 
as some foolishly suppose, but offering the true 
Hberty wherein alone is the fruition of our na- 
ture, and opposing that license whose end is the 
faction and disease of the soul. The operation 
of this check, the manner in which the Spirit of 
God moves upon the face of the waters, we can- 
not explain; it is of the very essence of dualism 
that the relation between the elements of our be- 
ing cannot be stated in positive terms. The be- 
ginning and end of philosophy are contained in 
the spiritual affirmation that it is better to be 
just than unjust, better to suffer all things for 
righteousness' sake than to do unrighteousness; 
but in the daily practice of Ufe no absolute law 
of just dealing has been vouchsafed to man, and 
he is left to the stern necessity of approaching 
wisdom humbly by the slow accumulations of ex- 
perience, and of learning by suffering. It should 
appear that Plato, in the proposed Dialogue on 
the Philosopher J had in mind to answer the per- 
plexities of the dualistic paradox once for all, 
and to set forth the law of the spirit in the lan- 
guage of positive metaphysics. That dialogue he 
never wrote, in honesty to himself could not 
write ; and who shall presume to supply what the 
master's hand left undone? 



292 PLATONISM 

"The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain." 

But Plato has done for us better than his 
promise. If the picture of the philosopher as an 
abstract ideal was not drawn, he has left us in the 
character and lineaments of Socrates an immor- 
tal portrait of philosophy incarnate in a living 
historic man. I shall not attempt to retell a 
story the beauty of which lies open for any one 
to read in its perfection. It is sufficient to point 
to the lesson of that life as a practical reconcilia- 
tion of the paradox that baffles reason and drives 
so many troubled minds to the positive extreme 
of religious asceticism or to the negative extreme 
of hedonism. Socrates was no ascetic; I doubt 
if any citizen of Athens more keenly enjoyed the 
common pleasures of the day, or was more heart- 
ily welcome amongst men of all shades of belief 
and all modes of Uving — except among the shams 
and pretenders. Yet, withal, he walked always 
with his ear inclined to the voice of the divine in- 
hibition; and when the voice spoke, it was as if 
an invisible wall was thrown about him, shutting 
him off from the solicitations of the world. It is 
not only that he could mingle innocent indul- 
gence with unflinching self-restraint and combine 
acceptance of the chances of fortune with the 
clearest self-direction, but there was about him a 
reserve, a mark of power, a sign of emancipation, 
which proved that he had bargained with life on 



CONCLUSION 293 

his own terms. Those who came close to him 
knew that what all the world desired, yet threw 
away, he had. 

For, however we may calculate the sum of 
pleasures and pains in such an existence as that 
of Socrates, the records, if words have any mean- 
ing, leave us in no uncertainty as to his happi- 
ness. At the end of the account of his last day in 
gaol the reporter of the scene declares that to his Piaedo ns 
friends he seemed in death the best and wisest 
and most just of all men they had known. To 
these epithets the reporter might well have add- 
ed "the happiest." That, indeed, is the strong- 
est and most enduring impression we get of the 
man, his pecuhar testimony to the reaHty of the 
spirit and to the value of philosophy — ^his happi- 
ness. Other saints and sages have pointed the 
way to a life in faith, have charmed us by the 
sweetness of their resignation, incited us by the 
fires of their charity, heartened us by their great 
courage, humiUated us by their superiority to 
temptation, allured us by the vision of heaven 
upon their faces, taught us, in a measure, the 
difference between the peace and the pleasure of 
the soul: but were it not for Socrates, the world, 
our western world at least, would have no assur- 
ance of the supreme victory of the truth in happi- 
ness. Herein he was greater than his greatest 
pupil. With all Plato's sweep of imagination 
and depth of insight, despite the fact that only 



294 PLATONISM 

through his sympathy and subtle understanding 
are the master's Hneaments really known to us, 
there are signs here and there in his works that 
he himself never altogether conquered the world 
or rose quite above the mists of spiritual pride. 
I do not mean, in these closing words, to belit- 
tle the achievement of one whose writings are the 
purest source of philosophy yet given to man- 
kind; but it is true, nevertheless, that, though 
Plato could perceive and depict the serenity of 
Socrates, he could not completely possess it. And 
when, in his searching of many questions, he 
went astray into doubtful paths, as now and then 
he did, leaving the door open to the strange mis- 
conceptions and confusions of a pseudo-Platon- 
ism, it was because for the moment he allowed 
himself to become unfaithful to the humility of 
spirit which was as much the strength of So- 
crates as was his certainty of spiritual conviction. 
There is a quaint story in Diogenes Laertius 
which tells how Socrates once met Xenophon in 
a narrow lane, and, putting his staff across it so 
as to prevent the young man's passage, asked him 
where the various necessities of Hfe were for sale. 
And when Xenophon had answered, he asked 
again where men might be made good and virtu- 
ous. And, receiving no reply, he said, "Follow 
me, then, and learn." So, as we read the Dia- 
logues of Plato, the figure of Socrates seems to 
rise before us, challenging us with his queries, and 



CONCLUSION 296 

bidding us follow him in the pursuit of truth and 
goodness. He would not say, if he were to meet 
us now, that we should make his hfe in ancient 
Athens the exact model of our conduct, for that 
was determined by the ephemeral circumstances 
of the hour; he would rather command us to deal 
honestly with ourselves and others, as he had 
done, and to look for our reward in that happi- 
ness which is the crown of philosophy. 

THE END 



APPENDIX 

For the beginner in Platonism the order of reading 
the Dialogues is of the first importance. The effect 
of plunging through Plato's works as they are ar- 
ranged in any of the existing editions or translations 
known to me is likely to be a state of bewilderment as 
to what all the talk is about. The traditional arrange- 
ment by tetralogies (groups of four) is arbitrary; un- 
related Dialogues are there forced together by some 
purely accidental resemblance, while others, closely re- 
lated in subject, may be widely separated. On the 
other hand none of the modem rearrangements is, in 
my judgment, satisfactory. Now, two principles of 
sequence are open to us, the chronological and the logi- 
cal; but neither of them is without difficulties. The 
chronological order in itself no doubt would be the most 
natural, if only we had some infallible criterion as to 
the relative time of composition. It is true that certain 
large outlines of sequence by this canon have been 
pretty generally agreed on, but the details are still 
disputed and are not likely ever to be settled. We are 
thus thrown upon the logical order of ideas; but here 
again there are serious difficulties. Plato did not al- 
ways finish one subject and then pass on to another; 
on the contrary his themes often cross one another in 
such a way that in a pair of Dialogues one theme may 
be more developed in what thus seems to be the later of 
the two in logical order, while the treatment of another 

9m 



298 PLATONISM 

theme would indicate that this Dialogue was the earlier. 
Our only recourse, therefore, is a compromise, and in 
the arrangement that follows I have proceeded frankly 
on that principle. In the main the groups there formed 
would appear to follow one another in the time of com- 
position, as they do, largely considered, in the logical 
order of ideas; but it is probable that in some cases a 
Dialogue included in a later group, for instance the 
biographical, was written before some one of an earlier, 
let us say, the Socratic, group. Within the groups the 
arrangement is logical and probably also, for the most 
part, chronological, though here again it was necessary 
to compromise. I can only say that the scheme is the 
one that seems to me, after reading Plato through many 
times, to give the clearest general notion of the de- 
velopment of his philosophy. The analyses which fol- 
low the diagram are, patently, of the most meagre sort. 
They make no pretension even to indicate the large sub- 
sidiary questions, often in themselves profoundly in- 
teresting, which branch out from the main ethical thread 
of Plato's thought. 



APPENDIX 

SUGGESTED ORDER OP READING 



I. So- 
cratic 



r Char- 
mid es 
Protag- 
oras 

. Gorgias 



II. Bio- 
graphic 



Euthy- 

phro 
Apology 
Crito 
Phaedo 



III. Ideal ^ 



299 



Meno 
Phaedrus 
Sympos- 
ium 




IV. The Republic 



(Gratylus 
Euthydemus 
Theaetetus 
Parmenides 
Sophist 



VL Cosmologicalj^j;?!^^^'^ 




VII. Laws 



Minor 



r Laches 

Th cages 

Lysis 

I and II Alcibiades 

Rivals 

Hipparchus 

Major and Minor Hippias 

lo 

Menexenus 

Clitopho 

Critias 

Minos 
. Epinomis 



SOO PLATONISM 

The Socratic Group 

In general these Dialogues are aporistic, that is, they 
set forth the difficulties and bearing of a question with- 
out coming to a definite conclusion. 

The Charmides deals with the nature of temperance. 
No satisfactory definition is discovered, but we are left 
with the suggestion that somehow the virtues run to- 
gether into one and are connected with some form of 
knowledge. 

The Protagoras asks whether virtue can be taught 
like the arts. Thus again the question is raised whether 
the virtues are all identical with some form of know- 
ledge. In what seems to be a digression, but is really 
the main point of progress from the Charmides^ So- 
crates suggests that virtue may depend on a science of 
measurement, by which we calculate the sum of pleasure 
and pain resulting from any act. According to this 
theory of hedonism the virtuous man would be he who 
can foresee most clearly the future, and the criterion of 
virtue would be pleasure. 

The Gorgias proves that pleasure and pain do not 
furnish a sufficient law of morality, and takes refuge 
in the intuition that justice (which now appears as the 
moral sense, or sum of the virtues) is better for a man 
than injustice. It hints at a distinction between pleas- 
ure and happiness, but appeals to the judgment after 
death to set right the apparent injustice of this life. 

The Biographic Group 

These four Dialogues are connected with the trial 
and death of Socrates. Together they give a portrait 
of him at the consummation of his life as the philo- 



APPENDIX 301 

sopher par excellence, and are thus a concrete practi- 
cal presentation of the intuition reached in the earlier 
group. 

The Euthyphro presents Socrates, at the eve of his 
trial, talking with a young friend on the nature of 
holiness. Euthyphro has no doubt of his perfect know- 
ledge of this virtue as a practical conformity with the 
will of the gods. Socrates, who is about to defend him- 
self against the charge of impiety, does not question 
the reality of holiness as an eternal Idea to be sought 
for and obeyed, but brings out the difficulty of de- 
termining what in any case is the will of the gods. To 
know this we must first know what holiness is. 

The Apology sets forth the divine mission of So- 
crates as one called to lead his people to consider the 
needs of the soul before those of the body. The spirit- 
ual affirmation is connected with scepticism, and the 
probability of an adjustment of the wrongs of life in a 
future world is still maintained. 

The Crito shows Socrates in gaol, unjustly condemned 
to death, yet unwilling to evade human laws by brib- 
ing his way to liberty. The belief is expressed that 
obedience to these decrees of the State will prepare a 
man to face the judgment of the Divine Laws. 

The Phaedo shows Socrates dying for his conviction, 
in happiness. He is happy because his real life here 
and now is in the eternal immutable world of Ideas, and 
to this life there is neither beginning nor end. 

The Ideal Group 

What is this world of Ideas in which the philo- 
sopher lives.'' 

The Meno resumes the old question whether virtue is 



302 PLATONISM 

a form of knowledge which can be imparted by instruc- 
tion. It connects Ideas with the things of eternity by 
the argument of reminiscence. Our knowledge of them, 
and our impulse to virtue, is a memory of our vision of 
absolute justice and goodness in some former existence. 

The Phaedrus places Ideas in a mythical superceles- 
tial sphere, as the Meno regarded them in a mythical 
time. The argument looks forward also to the meta- 
physical problem of truth and falsehood. 

The Symposium brings Ideas into life as an ethical 
force by exhibiting the love and desire they excite in 
the soul by the attraction of their beauty. 

The Republic 

Here the arguments of the earlier groups are de- 
veloped and woven together into a single strand. Jus- 
tice is the moral sense, and the other virtues are the 
specific applications of it. The just man, as he is just, 
is happy, now and here, and there is no need to appeal 
to future rewards and punishments. Justice and hap- 
piness are the effect of the Idea of the Good as the 
supreme cause. The philosopher is he whose life is 
governed by this cause. The knowledge of ourselves as 
happy in justice is an immediate certain intuition (the 
spiritual affirmation), above the practical knowledge, 
or opinion, which, working in the sphere of the specific 
virtues, is always subject to confirmation by the 
future. The constitution of the ideal State is expound- 
ed as a counterpart of the perfect philosopher. 

The Metaphysical Group 

As The Republic was the focus of the earlier dis- 
cussions, so from it radiate the later questions. The 



APPENDIX 303 

earlier contention had been with the rhetorical sophists 
who, as a class, ignored the authority of the moral law 
as having any stabihty apart from the universal flux. 
Now the ground shifts to the question of knowledge 
itself; passing from the naive to the metaphysical 
doubts of sophistry. The TheaetetuSf Sophist, and 
Politicus are internally connected, and almost certainly 
follow in this order. The Cratylus and Euthydemus 
are probably earlier, possibly a good deal earlier. The 
Parmenides, logically considered, seems to me to fall 
best between the Theaetetus and the Sophist; but there 
are undeniable objections to this arrangement. 

The Cratylus plays with the absurdities involved in 
the popular notion of the universal flux as betrayed by 
the etymologies of language, and proves the inadequacy 
of such a criterion for any one earnestly in search of the 
truth. 

The Euthydemus makes sport of the thesis that there 
is no distinction between knowledge and opinion, truth 
and falsehood. It eliminates this thesis by a reduction 
to the absurd. 

The Theatetus debates the question, What is know- 
ledge.'* Protagoras had argued that knowledge is ob- 
tained only by perception, that there is therefore no 
distinction between kinds of knowledge, and that the 
sensations of the individual are the only measure of 
truth. Socrates rebuts these theses, but comes to no 
satisfactory conclusion as to the nature of knowledge, 
that is of knowledge as a relation between subject and 
object. But he also strongly reaffirms the spiritual fact 
that we know it is best for a man to live in the world 
of Ideas, and to imitate in his conduct, so far as this 
is possible, the justice of the divine nature. 



304 PLATONISM 

The Parmenides first acknowledges the diflSculties in- 
herent in any rational explanation of the doctrine of 
Ideas (and of the moral certainty dependent on this 
doctrine). Secondly, it affirms the necessity of main- 
taining this doctrine, and exhibits the inadequacy of the 
metaphysical use of reason to prove or disprove what 
we possess by the higher intuition. 

The Sophist now shows the proper use of the reason, 
controlled by the content of experience, when dealing 
with the questions raised by the metaphysical logician. 
First it arrives at a physical definition of the sophist; 
then passes to his character; then discusses the nature 
of being and not-being (the relative), and sets down 
the sophist as one who deals with the realm of not- 
being. Meanwhile the second argument of the Parmen- 
ideSj the necessity of maintaining the doctrine of Ideas 
as an intuition superior to metaphysics, has been re- 
stated in summarized form. 

The Politicus undertakes to discuss the character of 
the statesman on the same level as the discussion of the 
sophist. Its most interesting part is the long mythical 
digression on the forward and backward revolutions of 
the world as it is now guided by the divine will and 
now left to move by its own innate impulsion. 

The Cosmological Group 

The exact chronological place of these two Dialogues 
is problematic. I^ogically they may be taken as a sequel 
and development of the mythical digression of the 
Politicus. 

The Timaeus turns from metaphysics to cosmogony. 
The dualism of knowledge and opinion has been forti- 
fied against the attacks of sophist and eristic ; the uni- 



APPENDIX 805 

verse is now shown to present itself to us in a corre- 
sponding dualism of the Divine and Necessity. To the 
former belong ethical Ideas ; science ranges in a region 
between the two. The essential parts of the first ac- 
count of creation will be found in sections 27d to 31b, 
34a to 35b, 36d to 38c, 39e and 40a, 41a to 43c ; of the 
second account in sections 47e to 52d, 69a to 70b, 70de. 
The Philebus returns to the old question of pleasure 
and pain, but with the results of the metaphysical in- 
quiry as a background. Which is the higher, pleasure 
or knowledge, and what is their relative position in the 
universal scheme? In answering this question the na- 
ture of things is divided into the cause, the limit, the 
limited, and the limitless ; the cause being equivalent to 
the Divine and the limitless to the Necessity of the 
Timaeus, while the limit and the limited are the effect 
of the interworking of the two extremes. Pleasure be- 
longs to the limitless, knowledge (of the sort embraced 
by science) to the limit. This return to the question of 
pleasure, now treated without the ascetic bias of the 
middle Dialogues, prepares us for the main ethical theme 
of the Lams, 

The Laws 

The life of man is discussed in relation to education, 
art, and religion, not measured by the ideal criterion of 
happiness as in The Republic, but by practical con- 
siderations of pleasure. On this same basis a system of 
laws is devised, not for an ideal State, but for the best 
feasible State in which the individual may freely de- 
velop. This Dialogue is known to be the work of Plato's 
last days, and it is in many respects a summing up and 
revision of all his previous writings. 



806 PLATONISM 

The Minor Dialogues 

These I have separated from the main groups, in 
some cases because they are trivial and probably spur- 
ious, and in other cases because, in essential matters, 
they do not advance upon one of the included Dialogues. 
In either case, it is well for the reader who approaches 
Plato for the first time to leave all of them, except per- 
haps the Laches and Theages, to the end. The Men- 
exenuSy in particular, raises the question of authenticity. 
Judging this Dialogue by intrinsic evidence alone, I 
should have been inclined to reject it as spurious, as 
some critics do not hesitate actually to do. Yet Aris- 
totle apparently accepted it as Platonic, and we know 
from Cicero that in his day it was so much admired as 
to be recited annually at Athens. Such testimony ought 
to instil modesty into the modem scholar. Some of 
the Dialogues, for example the First and Second Alci- 
biades, read as if they were composed by an accredited 
pupil of the Academy while Plato was still alive, and 
as such might be called semi-authentic. But this ex- 
planation, of course, I oflFer as pure conjecture. 

The Laches, Theages, and Lysis, dealing respectively 
with courage, wisdom, and friendship, might form a 
class by themselves with the Charmides. 

The First and Second Alcibiades have many points in 
common with the Euthyphro, The Rivals asks who the 
philosopher is, and answers that it is he who knows 
himself, and hence knows how to govern and give judg- 
ment. The Hipparchus debates the meaning of the 
profitable. 

The Hippias Major is on the nature of beauty. The 
Hippias Minor discusses ignorance as the real source of 



APPENDIX 307 

evil. The lo deals with poetry and the poet, and the 
Menexenus with oratory. 

The Clitopho shows Socrates taken to task because 
he has never given a positive definition of justice. It 
properly forms an introduction to The Republic. The 
Critias, an unfinished sequel to The Republic, was de- 
signed to narrate the heroic war of Athens with the 
mythical kingdom of Atlantis. 

The Minos, on the nature of law, may be taken as 
introductory to the Laws, The Epinomis, which pur- 
ports to be a continuation of the Laws, is in my judg- 
ment spurious. 

To the body of the Dialogues is appended a collec- 
tion of thirteen Letters, which I have never been able to 
accept as genuine, despite their early admission into 
the canon by critics of antiquity. Whether genuine or 
not, they are an important source for the facts of 
Plato's life. 

The brief Definitions of philosophic terms can scarce- 
ly be Plato's, but probably were composed for use in 
the Academy. 

Finally, in some editions there are six Dialogues ap- 
pended, aU trivial, which are certainly spurious, and 
were so regarded in antiquity. They need not be con- 
sidered. 



5477 



I 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 861 793 



! 



1 ♦ 



